LabVIEW Idea Exchange
A student came to see me about developing a "traffic-management" routine involving putting people in rooms. He wanted to simulate some algorithms, and asked for help doing this in LabVIEW. I immediately created an Office Plan out of Decorations.
I naively said "And not only that, you don't have to do this by hand -- you can write a LabVIEW program that takes a set of specifications (room size and placement) and creates this map for you!"
What a neat idea! Except when I tried to show him how it was done, I couldn't do it! I couldn't even programmatically distinguish between the "Building Outline" (a Frame) or a Room (a Raised Box), to say nothing of telling which box was which. I was able to show him we could write code that would rescale all of the Decorations, and could distinguish Rooms from Room Labels, but There Should Be More!
I noticed two earlier ideas -- one to give decorations a Label (which could, perhaps, be used to distinguish, say, a Room from the Frame) and another to allow the creation of a reference to a specific decoration, both of which I support and would probably need for my student's project. But a more general solution would be to be able to create a new Decoration Object of a specified Type (which should return either a reference or the Moral Equivalent of a Reference that could be used, along with Property Nodes, to size and position it).
Hmm -- does this already exist in LabVIEW Scripting? [I'm something of a newbie with Scripting -- I've created some "magical" things, like building a Cluster from a "specification", but am still learning when and how to use it]. If so, consider this a Vote for the Decoration Labels and the Decoration References Ideas!
