A universal conversion bullet.

[altenbach]

My goal is to reduce palette bloat!

Let's look at the conversion palette. Certainly looks impressive, but why do we need so many different bullets??? They are basically all the same function:  A universal input and an output type.

I suggest that the 16 marked bullets on the image, plus some others (e.g. "to variant"), be combined into a single universal bullet where we can select the desired output type by a simple right-click. Whatever we select will determine the actual icon, so once things are in place, everything will look exactly as before.

When we first drop the universal icon on the diagram (or insert it into a wire), the context menu appears and we must select the desired output.

[crossrulz]

You can read all about the Coerce To Type in another idea: Officially Support "Coerce to Type"

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Coerce To Type isn't in the palettes because it isn't stable (i.e. it crashes) for some types. It was created for some internal development work and was made to work just well enough for those cases. It has never been finished to be a publicly supported API.

[GregSands]

So is there a list of unsupported types?  Or even of known supported types?  I use Coerce To Type almost solely for converting integers to enums and have never had a problem.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

GregS: You're probably safe, but we're not going to publish a list -- that would give false sense of security. It's an unreleased feature. As with any unreleased feature, you should test it to make sure it works well enough for your application. If you're successful, great, but we're not going to encourage its use by publishing a list of "this should work" when we haven't really done the work to verify that. At best such a list would be "we haven't found any issues with these yet".

[Darren]

National Instruments will not be implementing this idea. Both LabVIEW and LabVIEW NXG will continue to have separate conversion bullets for the different numeric data types. There are future plans in place for both products to improve the experience of replacing one bullet type with another. 

[Darren]

Also, the Coerce To Type function is available in Quick Drop/palettes in LabVIEW 2018 and later:

http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361R-01/glang/coerce_to_type/