Additional NI Software Idea Exchange

Request for evaluation by a user group and update of VeriStand System Explorer user interface.  The System Explorer user interface has changed little in several years - small improvements, such as allowing the user to enter formulas using the PC keyboard rather than the interface within the Calculated Channel Configuration Page would be significant.  As an example, the INERTIA Calculation Custom Device is more user friendly and intuitive.  

Additionally, the ability to better organize Calculated Channels, Alarms, Aliases, User Channels, etc. after creation would be helpful.  For large projects, where we have dozens of variables and calculated channels, it is a significant amount of work to organize after the variables or calculated channels are created.  Creating folders beforehand to help organize is a workaround, but after the fact, using the Cut and Paste functions are clunky - the ability to drag and drop would be preferred.

This is a bit of a feature request for the service request manager and/or as a stand-alone (my NI web) tool!  

It is needed because the NI webpage makes it terribly hard to search for CAR#'s and a CAR# is only listed when solved, and only listed for the one version where it was resolved, making it nigh-on impossible to check lists of (new) CAR#s and get notified when they are resolved.

For example, I know this CAR exists, but I'm not sure if it has been resolved and the NI search just didn't find it, or if does not exist (user input error for example) or anything..

1. The tool should reside on "my NI" but it should be possible to export/share the list of monitored CAR's (so colleageus/companies can maintain one master list of company relevant CAR's).
2. The tool should connect/check against NI (ideally directly to a back-end database) and return any "public" information related to a CAR, such as "in progress", "known work-around", "details" etc. along with driver/software version where it was resolved (if any).
3. The tool should present a clear list (ideally with green checkmarks / red cross icons) showing the status of each CAR and maybe a synopsis/one-liner from the description to indicate what problem the number is for.
4. wish-list added feature:  allow (on a per user basis) the user to add personal notes to a CAR (e.g. this affects projects x, y and z, once resolved, refactor those projects to remove performance intensive work-arounds!) or similar.
5. e-mail notification (optional/configurable) when the status changes on any of the tracked CAR's.

As far as how it relates to the service request manager, I would prefer a separate tool but that it also can link to the service request manager as outlined below:

A small but significant number of tickets either relate to, or create one or more CAR#'s (or at least mine seem to create a large amount of CAR's).

When a support tech adds / associates a ticket# with a CAR#, ideally this CAR# would be automatically added to the user's CAR Tracking list..

In addition it would be great if the back-end database tracked CAR#'s and offered up a list of these numbers in the webpage overview, for example next to the "status" column. Taking it a step further, it would be very nice if NI could make it simpler to check if a CAR has been resolved and if so, what version of LabVIEW it was resolved in/with. This information could be displayed in the same web page table, or a new page to itself. The "Status" column could then also be expanded with a green check-mark if (all) associated CAR#'s have been resolved..

Tracking CAR's and manually trying to search and check them off lists locally is labor intensive, especially since the web-page "search" does not do even a passable job when you enter CAR numbers.

I/O Trace is extremely useful when debugging system-level text-based applications. Error handling for systems involving multiple drivers + software packages (RF toolkits, for example) is very difficult. After recognizing there was an error, we still have to determine which device threw the error and then query the appropriate driver/toolkit with the correct handle to determine what the error was. NI I/O Trace is a great way to quickly determine which device threw an error and at which function call. Unfortunately, the error reporting returned by I/OTrace is pretty limited. For example, consider the I/O Trace shown below of an application synchronizing two waveform generators. A property is not configured correctly for one of the generators. I/O Trace clearly indicates there is an error, however the exact cause of the error is difficult to discern from the message: 

The actual error message is: “The Sample Rate property can not be configured if OSP Enabled is VI_TRUE. “. It would be great if I/O trace could provide the entire error description. Compare this to the LabVIEW error handler:

In LabVIEW, we have a lot of options for saving our projects as seen below:

In VeriStand, currently, you only have the option for a normal save (as shown below). I think it would be nice to have a "Save As" for saving a copy of the project and, if possible, a "Save for Previous Version".