Improve Explain Changes

[JÞB]

Ran across this AGAIN today.  Its pretty annoying and should be fairly simple to implement.  I would suspect that the dev team got a bit rushed and never came back to flesh out the Detail functionality.  Time to post this here I guess.

[JackDunaway]

A related request to improve the User Interface of the Explain Changes Dialog. +1 for fleshing out the implementation.

[Mr.Mike]

Unfortunately, this would not be an easy change.  Internally changes are recorded as a set of flags such as attribute changed, new object, object moved, cosmetic changes (i.e. don't require), etc. There are about 25 or 30.

Adding flags isn't too hard, but changing the meanings of existing ones is, since we would need to find every use of the flags and reassign them.  If we went so far  as to specify what changed and what the old/new values are, it would be extremely complex.

However, if NI did choose to do this, it would help if we had some suggestions as to what our customers wanted to see.  What sort of changes would you like to see?  How specific?  How important is it to the community to see the old and new values?  What attributes of projects are interesting?  How about VIs?  Every single one, or only major ones?  How would you envision the mass of data being presented?

I'm not shooting this idea down, just trying to explain the complexity of it and provide a good place to start if we do implement it.  Thank you for your suggestion.

[RavensFan]

Jeff,

I have seen this dialog quite a bit for projects and have also found it annoying.  By looking at the .lvproj file before and after saving the project with the "changed attribute", I think I know what causes it in most of my situations.  The .lvproj file has a section for dependencies, that part of the tree that shows all of the dependent subVI's that you have not explicitly defined in the upper part of the project tree.  I'm not sure why it needs to save the filenames, but it looks like it might be doing it to define the order that it shows up under the dependencies branch of the tree.

If you have a project and modify one of your VI's, perhaps creating or deleting a subVI to the point that it would change your list of dependencies, then the project detects that it needs to add or delete something to the dependency list and thus you are prompted to resave the entire .lvproj file even thought you really haven't changed the project.

[Allen_W.]

Mr. Mike, I guess I don't understand the complexity, but even a category of message such as the ones you started to list would be more helpful than "an attribute was changed."  Perhaps a scrollable list with a limitation on the maximum number of entries? 

The way it is now is like a LabVIEW program that on error produces only the message "There is an error present" without any further detail.