Cannot Find the 'Show Connector' option in LabVIEW

[lquarshie]

I cannot find the 'Show Connector' option in LabVIEW.

How can I fix this?

Image attached.

[altenbach]

In newer version (except ancient!), the connector panel is to the left of the icon, it already shows, right?

[lquarshie]

Are you saying that is what is on the left of the clicked icon?

[altenbach · Accepted solution]

yes

[lquarshie]

Okay thanks.

[Bob_Schor]

You do know that the LabVIEW Editor has two views, the Front Panel view (which you show in your picture) and the Block Diagram view (which you can see by typing Ctrl-E to flip between Front Panel and Block Diagram views), right?

When you are looking at the Block Diagram view and see a LabVIEW function (like "Add") just sitting there, unwired, there are no visible terminals showing.  But get near it with your mouse pointer and Input and Output terminals (orange dots, in the case of Add, two on the left (the "input" side) and one on the right (the "output" side).  If you get the cursor close enough, it should change from an Arrow to a spool of "Wire" that you click on a terminal, drag somewhere (spooling wire as you go) until you click on another terminal to "wire them together".

Notice the color of the wire.  Tells you something about what Data are being carried.  Orange = Floats, Blue = Integer, Green = Boolean, Thick usually means Array, patterned often means Cluster.  And there are more.

Check out the NI Learning Center shown on the first page of the Forum.

Bob Schor 

Bob Schor

[lquarshie]

For all these, I know.

I was trying out an example from the NI website that demonstrated the 'Show Connector' option by clicking on the icon.

However, I didn't see that in the version of LabVIEW I was using, so I was asking for this.

Thank you.

[Bob_Schor · Accepted solution]

Could you point us to the "example from the NI website that demonstrated the "Show Connector" option?  I know there was (more than a decade ago) discussions about the Connector Pane shown on the upper-left corner of the Front Panel.  I also discovered an "interesting feature" that I didn't know existed -- if you write-click on a sub-VI on the Block Diagram, select "Visible Items" and choose "Terminals", you'll "see something interesting" that I never knew existed!  Plus ça change, etc.

Bob Schor

[altenbach · Accepted solution]

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@lquarshie wrote:

I was trying out an example from the NI website that demonstrated the 'Show Connector' option by clicking on the icon..

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Back in prehistoric times, the front panel showed either the icon or the connector pane in the upper right corner, but not both.

Back in the days, the number of available pixels was very limited and it made sense to only show one view (LabVIEW started on the original Macintosh, which had a monochrome 9 inch screen of 512x342 pixels!), where even the stacked sequence structure made some sense!

In any case, any recent (and not so recent) LabVIEW version shows the icon and connector pane side-by-side, saving us a few clicks. You can simply skip the step to show connectors.

Obviously, the help is updated, but you most have found some old instructions covered in cobwebs (e.g me here 20 years ago!) that assumed the old scenario. Also on e.g. the following video.

If there is a stale tutorial on ni.com, that would need to be updated, so please give us the link.

[lquarshie · Accepted solution]

I cannot specifically point to the link to that video but here is the link to the webpage containing all videos including the 'SubVI' video that has this in there 2 mins and 30 seconds into the video

https://learn.ni.com/learn/article/labview-tutorial#TARGET_1