I make a data analysis program, where the data consists of some million events and each event has e.g. 4 channels and 1-5 hits on each channel.
I would like the user to select different expressions of these channels to give coordinates to plot in a 2D histogram (increment a bin in Intensity Graph), e.g. for some experiment you want to show x=ch1-ch2; y=ch1+ch2+ch3+ch4; while in another experiment you want x=ch1-123; y=123-ch2;
There are other VIs that use static LabView-code for the normal things, but now after a few years of adding to this program I find that it would be quite good with a general plotter and let the user specify simple expressions like this. Also with the "normal" static plots, there is a need to filter out bad data and then it would be much simpler both to program and use if you could write text expressions with boolean logic to combine multiple filters. Making a LabView code and GUI that allows AND/OR/parenthesis combinations of expressions will be quite an effort and not very reusable.
So, with the above motivation, I hope you see that it would make sense to have a useable string formula evaluator in LabView. I find some info about MathScript's user-defineable functions, but haven't managed to get MathScript working in LV2010 yet (maybe some licensing or installation issues, I think I had it in 8.6). But I think it would be possible to do most of what I want for the display-part (not the filtering) with the simpler Eval/Parse Formula Node VIs and suitable use of the limited variable name space. So I started testing, and found a quite annoying issue with how the evaulator works.
To the parser, you are expected to send an array of output variable names. But then it ignores this array, and returns one output per assignment/semicolon in the formula, in the order of the formula text. Since the static parts of my program need to know what the output values mean (which of them is x and which is y), I would have to rely on the user not using any intermediate variable and defining x before y. The attached screenshot demonstrates the problem, and also that it has been solved by NI statff in the "Eval Formula Node VI" which does the appropriate array-searching to extract only the pre-defined outputs, in their expected order. But using that VI is about 100 times as slow, I need to pre-compile the formula and then only use the evaulator in the loop that runs over a million events.
I don't know if I'll take the time to make my own tweks to the parsing stage (e.g. preparation of array-mapping to not have to repeat the search or maybe hacking the output list generated by the parser) or if I'll have to make it in a static Formula Node in the block-diagram (which supports more functions), so that the user has to run with development environment and stop the program to change the plotting function. But I wanted to share this trouble with you, in hope of improvments in future LabView versions or ideas from other people on how I could accomplish my aim. I have MATLAB-formula node possibility too, but is far as I have seen the only place the user could update the formula would then be in a separate .m file, which is re-read only when typing "clear functions" in the Matlab console window. (Having this window is also an annoyance, and perhaps the performance of calling Matlab in every iteration is not great.)
Besides this issue, it also seems very strange there is virtually no support for conditional expressions or operators in Formula Node evaulated formulas (called Mathematics VIs in the documentation). Maybe using (1+sign(a-b))/2 you can build something that is 0 when a<b and 1 when a>b, but it is not user friendly! Would it really be diffcult to add a function like iif(condition, return_value_if_true, return_value_if_false) to replace the unsupported "condition ? if_true : if_false" operator? Would it really be difficult to add support for the < <= >= > == || && operators? Although compiled to an assemply language, this can't exactly be difficult for a CPU.
