X___

I believe a LabVIEW Jupyter kernel is out of the question without NI involvement. And it wouldn't address my use case, as I would want users to work with data in python. Moreover, I would for instance lose access to all the parallel job tools that I have access on my local cluster supporting Jupyter notebooks 🙂

Sure. But then you cannot move the elements independently. Unless you ungroup, move, regroup. A modular object (such as a Graph) should be moveable as a whole, but its components should ideally be moveable individually. I have no idea how NI does that with their native controls, but this is obviously feasible. This is for instance something that was completely destroyed in XControls (an XControlled-Graph is frozen solid if I recall my now forgotten attempts to expand Graphs, unless you rebuild the whole independent component grabing and moving, as I was told by NI).

just forgot to add that my comment about the lack of flexible grouping in LV referred to edit time behavior, which Wiebe's tool doesn't cover. Basically, we need to be able to group objects so as to be able to grab them and move them around as a whole (at edit time), but also be able to grab one inside the group and reposition it (ability which most graphical software provide; not sure about NXG). Essentially what one can do for members of a cluster, without the drawback I was illustrating above.

I thought it might be helpful if I clarified my use case. Most of my development is LV-based, but I can hardly find anyone interested in working with that code (proprietary language, expensive, graphical, etc.) therefore, in order to be able to share and make what I do expandable by others, I need to interface it with something that is exactly the opposite. Jupyter notebooks are that thing today. What I am looking for is: 1) a way to send markdown text and graphing instructions to reproduce plots generated in LV (or plots that can't easily be produced in LV) in the Jupyter Notebook. The goal is to replace a custom-designed Notebook I based on a .NET rich text box control, which works fine, but is not interactive. 2) a way to pass data structures generated in LV (which the user will have extensive documentation about) to the Jupyter Notebook so that the user of the Notebook can do some processing on their own. 3) a way to send instructions (think custom scripting language) and data to LV. Point 3 is to some extent covered by your tool, as long as LV polls the kernel (and knows which variable to look for). Whether or not a better communication protocol (with user events?) can be designed is up. Points 1 and 2 are pretty much the same thing, the only difference being that 2) might involve bi-directional communication (LV sends data that is processed in the Notebook, which then sends back the result (see Point 3). The original use case, however, is merely to provide data for the user to do whatever they want with. A big unknown to me is whether it would make sense to have access to the Notebook structure within LV (cells, history, data).

For my particular (ultra-simple) application, that would be an overkill, as I already handle that with a custom-made handler. For the general case, that could certainly be a way to handle multi-component objects. But my question is whether what @The Q is describing above is something that can be done within the wizard (picking one of the controls of the multi-component control as the starting class and doing the weight lifting to add the references to the other controls).

Sending moral support your way...

OK so the connection to a Jupyter notebook works, great. I can define a variable in the notebook and read its value in LV. Now how do I send something to the notebook from LV? 🙂

Let us know when it is posted on VIPM's package list.

I'm way above my head here, but are you saying that in principle the "clustering" of multiple control is just a convenience trick or is that bringing advantages (such as access to class properties via property nodes) that would be lost otherwise (defining a facade with multiple controls NOT bundled into a cluster)? Of course, what's missing for this to be even practical, is more flexible way of grouping objects in LabVIEW (that is, one that allows moving things within a group). Just to put my questions in context, I have developed a simple (well, relatively) way of adding a tip strip to graphs so that long plot names can be read without having the legend size explode. I was contemplating migrating it to a QControl, but the layout of a Graph (due to its accessory panels) can be quite random, and if everything (graph and tip strip) is put into a cluster, the problem I was raising above would potentially ruin the day in some UI cases.

Sure, but there are cases like this (vertical "scrollbar" over horizontal "scrollbar", but this works also for the opposite situation): You can "interlace" two XY Graphs and move their "accessory" panels and not have any problems using either one, no matter which one is on top or in the back: It's just something to keep in mind before being bitten late in the development process.

Unless I am mistaken, the composite control approach of using a cluster will potentially cause problems if such a control happens to be partially overlapping another control (on a VI panel). I tried to "dislocate" the large scrollbar QControl to emulate a moving subcomponent, and put a String control underneath the transparent part of the cluster (separate control) as illustrated below: Sure enough, this String control is inaccessible at runtime. Unless I am missing something, that's a caveat users may want to consider before embarking into complex control design...

Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it.

@The Q In the manual, you write (7.3 Methods): I don't see any example of a public method in the examples coming with the toolkit, so I am trying to figure out the intended use. My understanding is that if I want to add a method to a QControl (say, "Add Element"), I need to provide a VI which the user needs to use wherever they want to call that method, rather than having the convenience of using an Invoke Node and connecting the QControl refnum to it (which would be neat, as this would provide a built-in list of methods). Do I get the idea right? It sounds like a polymorphic VI for those methods could do the trick of providing a list of methods, and using VIs not shown as Icons would bring us close to an Invoke Node: The VI above has nothing to do with QControls, it's just borrowed from my own approach to the same problem (of native control enhancement), but it shows what I mean. If that makes sense, I wonder whether this is something that could be added to the Wizard? Something like "New Method from template" that would add a VI to (or create if there is none) a polymorphic VI and let the user define the number of parameters to use for that specific control (or fix that to one, I could live with either option)...

@gb119 Outstanding work! Just getting started trying it, so bear with the basic comments: - The automated kernel path search on Windows fails to find ipython.exe located in C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\Scripts\ipython.exe Since I have turned off "Enable automatic error handling dialogs" in Options, I couldn't figure out the problem until I dug down into the diagram (luckily that was trivial due to the nice code layout). Maybe a separate tab with an error indicator could help at that early stage? - Right now each LabVIEW code instance starts a new kernel and stops it upon quitting. This departs from the broader use case mentioned in your intro (remote kernel) and I am not sure whether that is because of the early nature of the project or because that would require a different design (clearly it would, but would it be fundamentally different?). In particular, the seduction for me would be to be able to interact with an existing Jupyter Notebook (having its own kernel already running) or better yet, spawn a Jupyter Notebook. Is that something you have in mind for the future? I'll go back to testing. Keep up this great stuff!

In retrospect, I believe this would be a nice UI tool to define (contextual) menus: starting from a pre-populated template, unchecking boxes would simply remove that item (or sub-menu) from the final control menu.