LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

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At present CVI is missing a serious report printing facility that permits to create flexible, professional and good looking reports.

A quick search in CVI forum shows that periodically somebody posts questions about reporting but available instruments at the moment are not satisfactory in my experience.

As far as I can tell, a good reporting instrument:

Should integrate easily with CVI
Should be fully documented, with some example for the more typical types of reports (text + table, text + graph, text + image...)
Should not rely on external programs (some customers have rigid constraints on the software installed on equipment machines; additionally, asking them to have full Word or Excel or Diadem installed only for reporting is just not serious)
Should not rely on ActiveX controls to be licensed separately (same as above)
Should permit to include text and graphics (images, graphs...) and define headers, footers, page numbering and other common features normally present in reports
Should output data directly to the printer or in PDF format
Should have a preview facility both for development and for the user (something that NIReports hasn't and will never have)

Summary:

Display more struct member information during source editing and during debug.

Description:

While editing source code, CVI only displays the struct members, but no information regarding the type of the member (or declaration information, line file and line).

Add a tooltip to the right of the pop-up displaying the struct members in the source editor to display this information. Similar to this picture:

Also add support for displaying nested structs and even display the member values while debugging, in form of a tree, when execution is suspended (CVI currently only displays the memory address of that struct variable).

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We have recently dropped CVI (as of 2009) as an option for use with our many data visualization applications. The graphic performance is just too slow and clunky to put up with any longer and gets worse as we add features or try to make 'native looking' applications (that resize, animate, etc).

Things like dragging/updating cursors is noticably clunky when you have more than one graph updating (linked cursors across more than one graph).

Updating datasets in large tables is slow enough to watch it step through the rows. Even using suggest tips like using ATTR_CTRL_VAL instead of SetTableCellVal, when a large table has to update... it's painfully noticeable. Basically any operation that updates a large portion of the UI.

Another example, try to resize and move controls (as most other applications do) on the EVENT_PANEL_SIZING?

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that CVI doesn't use any graphics card acceleration? since workstation or netbook doesn't seem to make much difference in graphic performance.

Our clients notice when our applications look 'clunky' and 'slow' when compared to smooth, responsive apps/interfaces from competitors. It's often the little things that make a big difference in appearance.

Greg

I realize that there may be open source solutions for this but I would love a robust easy to use email function on completion. Essentially, I am gearing up to run some larger batched analysis routines on a remote workstation for our user group. The analysis time and queue length will vary from minutes to hours (hopefully not days yet). I would love the option to email the user on completion, failure, or email me if something really goes crazy.

The problem with the current simple email solution (unless authentication was really recently implemented) is that almost every SMTP server requires additional authentication to combat spammers I suppose.

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In CVI there are two kind of buttons:

the classic text button (i.e. a button with a text where you can't insert an image)
the picture button (i.e. a button with an image where you can't add a text)

But if you try to design a modern interface (like the MS Outlook 2010 ribbon, for example) you need a button where you can have both

an image statically or dynamically loaded from file)
a text string localized through the UIR localizer

Even in the new CVI 2010 SP1 there isn't a convenient workaround (see here, for example).

In LabVIEW, otherwise, this kind of buttons can be easily created.

An interesting feature would be also a setting to set the text position referred to the picture (top, bottom, left, right).

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I know we used to have this web server feature 6-7 years ago.

I would request a function where we can export designated panel which user can control from web. Also provides an option to have read only or read/write access. Also password options.

Something like this.

ExportPanelToWebServer (panelHandle, READ_ONLY_FLAG, PASSWORD_FLAG, PASSWORD);

//This starts web server automatically and ready for connection on port 80.

This opens door to lots of applications which requires web control. I think LabVIEW has similar feature. (Web publishing tool)

we are daily dealing with "constant name" field's values that canNOT exceed 21 characters due to restriction on labwindows/CVI.

even the latest CVI/2009 SP1 v9.1.1 (450) has this restriction.

this is very tedious because our software makes use of this value to make cross searches in the registers' table of our component.

as such, if the "constant name" field's value must be trimmed down to <=21 chars to comply with CVI restriction above, this makes the cross-search unusable.

please increase this limit up to 32 chars (at least).

Pascal Janin

STMicro Grenoble France.

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I have had severe problems in development, due to a high synergy between my lack of attention and CVI behavior in search/replace dialogs.

I am talking about the fact that Find/Replace parameters [namely search directories] are stored at REGISTRY level, so that they remain the same across different workspaces.

Having to work with different version of the same software product, I have found myself looking into the wrong sources, or even doing mass updates, due to the fact that different projects have identically named sources and includes, just in different directory trees, and rapidly switching from one workspace

to the next I didn't "mind the step"

My suggestion, thus, is to store find/replace parameters at workspace or project level, so as to avoid the aforementioned inconvenience

Summary:

Improve the Breakpoints Window, so that breakpoints can be more easily managed.

Description:

1. Change the Breakpoints Window, from a modal dialog to a dockable window (similar to the Watch Window). Debugging can be more easy this way.

2. Allow breakpoints to be grouped, disabled/enabled and edited in user defined categories. This allows users to easily collectively manage several breakpoints at a time. It also helps the user to logically group breakpoints, depending on various issues issues that he might be working on.

3. Breakpoints could also be sorted from a pop-up menu by filename, line, hit count, etc.

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When operating graphs in Labview, it is easy to change the scale of an axis of a graph (at runtime): to change e.g. the maximum value, you select the current maximum value with your mouse, type in the maximum number you want and hit enter. To achieve the same in Labwindows, you have to use a numeric control and a button, which is a bit cumbersome. The same applies for zooming: In Labview, you can click a small button attached to the graph and select the way you want to zoom, and then just use the mouse. In Labwindows, you have to know that zooming is done using the ctrl button, ctrl+space restores the previous setting, etc. It would also be nice to be able to enable autoscale by right-clicking on an axis and having a popup menu which allows to do so (just like in Labview). And if the user changes e.g. the maximum value while autoscale is enabled, it would be nice to automatically disable autoscale (unlike in Labview).

So in general, it would be nice to have more comfort in operating graph controls.

Thanks.

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Seriously, NI should look over the newer Visual Studio IDE's as well as NetBeans for some good ideas ...

Here's a few:

1. When using the F2 function to find a previously marked spot, you can't easily look for the next bookmark going backwards or restricitng the search to the current module. You can in Viusal Studio.

2. There's no clue offered for the extent of a block - other IDE's either backlight the match braces (VS 2008) or draw vertical lines showing the block extent (a popular VB add-in tool does this).

3. Refine the search selection to be current module, current project, or current workspace ...

4. Allow concurrent builds of multiple projects within a workspace - VS 2008 allows this, in fact, the default is to build everything in the current solution (solution = workspace).

5. Allow toggled commenting of multiple lines of selected text, rather than the "exclude" option that won't let you save excluded lines without commenting them - then the IDE lets you comment them, but not until then. Same thing with un-comment.

6. Implement a lazy background re-compile that re-compiles as you type - saves you a jillion CTRL-K keystrokes to do it yourself. Couple this with near real time notification of compile errors as you type.

7. Fix the &*!)$@^ CVI linker to allow 16 byte alignment.

8. Implement full C99 (MS hasn't done this though and apparently never will).

9. Dim conditionally compiled source that isn't going to compile - nothing is more irritating to me when editing than forcing yourself to ignore conditionally compiled code that's not going to compile. It's tricky to make this work right but it'd stil be worth a try. VS 2008 kind of does this.

10. Provide a pull down menu of functions within a module - this is better than the CVI source browser which is a PITA to use - ti's no wonder to me that this is the most requested improvement so far.

There are many library functions that return several parameters. Many of which you may not care about. Some functions allow you to pass NULL to ignore some returned parameters, but many do not.

For instance:

LinFit (X, Y, NbP, NULL, NULL, &Intercept, &Err);

if you are only interested in the Intercept and error values, will crash on run with a "Null pointer argument to library function" fatal error.

The way it's currently written , you have to (correctly) declare plenty of dummy arguments for your calls.

Currently, there is no way to access the historical data on a stripchart. The only way to manage this data is to maintain a separate buffer and update it whenever you add data to the strip chart, which is inefficient and tedious. Accessing data is possible for graph controls using the data attribute:

GetPlotAttribute (panel, PANEL_GRAPH, plotHandle, ATTR_PLOT_XDATA, &data);

Something similar should be implemented for the strip chart, either as an attribute in the getTraceAttribute function, or as a standalone function (getTraceData, etc.)

The JIT debugger option in CVI 2010 is a nice step in the right direction, but only being able to debug builds that were compiled in "Debug" mode pretty much defeats the whole purpose of the idea. Debug builds are much too slow to be used in production and on my machines, if I ever use a Debug build, it probably already runs under the debugger anyway! Seeing that CVI is not even an optimizing compiler I cannot understand why release builds cannot be properly debugged.

Thing is, the crashes in production are the important ones that I absolutely need to be able to investigate, and CVI does not provide ANY assistance in this area apart from being able to at least generate a MAP file. This is what I currently have to do: I have included code in my application that creates a memory dump and sends it to me when the application crashes or hangs. This dump I can then load into WinDbg and with a few tricks I can at least import the CVI MAP file to get some functions names in the stack traces, but that's it, all investigations have to be done on the assembly level. To quickly decipher stack frames, e.g. to have a look at local variables, I often even have to throw my OWN code into a disassembler (IDA Pro)! I'm really glad that this way I am now at least able to debug most crashes at all, even when they happen far away in a different country, but this aren't the 80s anymore and you can probably imagine that this process is hard and time consuming and very much annyoing. With code compiled in VC on the other hand I can load a MiniDump and have a look at the stack trace, variables and code on the source level without much hassles.

Some ideas that could help:

- Let me (JIT) debug release builds

- Let me load MiniDumps into the debugger or

- create PDB files that I can use together with a debugger that can load MiniDumps (WinDbg, VS)

- Let me not only use an external compiler but also an external linker that generates PDB files for release builds (I don't like this solution as I use C99 features VC does not support, but I'm desperate here)

Okay, rant over for now, I think I really needed to vent a bit. Thanks for reading this far 😉

All the best, Marcel

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LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

More predefined command buttons

Add a serious report printing tool to CVI!

Display More Information About Struct Members

Improved/Accelerated Graphic Performance

Email with user authentication

A new "Picture and Text" Command Button

Control Labwindows/CVI panel from web browser.

remove restriction of max. 21 characters on "constant name" values

Save as development distribution

Find / Replace parameters and lost time

Improve Breakpoints Window

Improve comfort when working with graphs

Improved DirSelectPopup function

Implement a bunch of the Visual Studio 2008 editor features in the CVI editor ;-)

Ability to pass NULL to many library functions

Add a Method to Access Strip Chart Data

Proper post mortem debugging support

Add an attribute to set vertical alignment for label text

Launch proper CVI version upon double clicking a CWS (or PRJ)

change TUI file format to xml (or create a new xui...)