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George Gall

Allow Creation of Local Variables or Property Nodes from a selection of Controls or Indicators

I don't know if this is already possible (please tell me how) or has already been suggested but what would save a lot of time on my current task is the following.

I would like to be able to select a group of, say, indicators and create a local variable for each with a couple of mouse clicks. 

Or create for each a property node. (t would have to be the same property for each, such as "Visible".)

 

The program I'm writing has a lot of indicators in each of many cases and in each case I need to specify visible or not for the indicators in that case. It is a long plod creating the property nodes one by one and changing each to write. I think I saw in the new ideas list a request that the Read or Write state of newly created properties be controllable. The defaults seem always, in my experience, to be wrong. This also seems to apply to local variables as well, which always come up as write and I seem to need read all the time.

I don't suppose these enhancements would be hard to implement.

4 Comments
RavensFan
Knight of NI

There is a Right Click Framework utility called Build an Array of References.  You pick the terminals, right click and choose that, now you have an array of references which you could feed into a For Loop with auto indexing where you can use the Visible property node.

JackDunaway
Trusted Enthusiast

That would be a GUI Programmer's Dream! 😉

 

I'll copy a comment from that thread:

 

More generically, if you highlight several terminals, you should be able to perform any action that is common to all: Change to Indicator/Control, Change to Constant, Hide/Show Control/Indicator, Find Instances (of typedef), Find Locals, View as Icon...

 

(And even more generically, if you highlight any group of objects on either the FP or BD, common actions should be available. A small step toward this was applied between 8.6.1 and 2009, which allowed you change common properties of objects in bulk....)

Mark_Yedinak
Trusted Enthusiast

While I agree that this would be useful I could also see where this would enable programmers to produce some very ugly code. For anything other than GUIs it is a good practice to avoid using locals and properity nodes. Making it easier to create lots of them quickly could be problematic for new programmers.



Mark Yedinak
Certified LabVIEW Architect
LabVIEW Champion

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Darren
Proven Zealot