OK, embarrassing enough, I'm still learning the web social technologies (communities, blogs, wikis, groups, kudos, discussions, ...). So, I think I want to just create a new Blog Post for our Group and add another cool Darren's Weekly Nugget link. Let's try it!
Once again, you get two for the price of one and this is Darren's 2nd (Jan 2006) of many, but I still found it very interesting and worth sharing here. Eventually, I may hit one I'll skip so we don't end up being 3 years behind forever...
Summary:
Nugget 1: In case you didn't notice, there is a new function on the Comparison palette in LabVIEW 8.0 called "Empty Array?". You can wire an array of any datatype and any dimension to this function, and it returns a boolean indicating whether or not the array you wired in was empty. This is much more elegant than the way we always had to do it in the past, which was to use the Array Size function to check the size...it got even more annoying with an array of 2 or greater dimensions, since you had to multiply the elements of the Array Size output.
Nugget 2: Another function on the Comparison palette is "Empty String/Path?". But did you know this function can tell you about the emptiness of other things besides strings and paths? There are actually 5 different datatypes this function can check the emptiness of. In addition to strings and paths, you can also use this function to determine if a variant, picture, or DSC tag is empty. I have used this trick before on a subVI that had a variant input to it...I checked the variant on the diagram to see if it was empty, and if so, I assumed the user did not wire anything into that input of the subVI.
Here is the link, if you want to see the follow on discussions:
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=162745
Scott Rogers
Sr. DSM
Western NY
