Touche
It was just to show branching. What the numbers are is irrelevant. that's why I don't understand your difficulty with reading one value and showing another. I could just as easily read an int and displayed a dble.
But anyway.......
Just saving the ADC won't give you more precision. In fact, the last bit (or more) is probably noise. Its the post processing that gives a more accurate reading. You usually gain 1/2 a bit of precision and with post-processing like interpolation and averaging, significant improvements can be made (this is quite a good primer). What s the obsession with saving the ADC?
Now. From your n and m descriptions, I'm assuming you're thinking nxm configurations (is that right?). But. You don't care what the sensor is only that it has an analogue output which you can measure. You can't log data from nxm devices simultaneously because you only have m channels. So you only have to configure m channels (or the engineers do at least).. If you allow them to make a new task every-time they change something, the list of tasks in MAX very quickly becomes un-manageable. We use 192 digital IOs for example. Can you imagine going through MAX and and creating a Task for each one?
What you are describing is a similar problem we have with part numbers. Its a management issue rather than a programming one. We (for example) may have 50 different part numbers, all with different test criteria (different voltage/current measurements, excitation voltages, pass-fail criteria etc, etc). But they all use the same hardware of course, otherwise we couldn't measure it.
So the issue becomes how can we manage lots of different settings for the same hardware. Well. One way is a directory structure where each directory is named with the part number and contains any files required by the software (camera settings, OCR training files, DAQ settings, ini-files, pass/fail criteria....maybe 1 file, maybe many). The software only needs to read the directory names and hey presto! Drop down list of supported devices. New device? New directory. You can either copy the files from another directory and modify, or create a fancy UI that basically does the same thing. Need back-ups? Zip the lot Need change tracking? SVN!
Another is a database which takes a bit more effort to interface too (some think its worth it), but the back-end for actually applying the settings is identical. And once you've implemented it you can do either just by using a case statement.
What you will find with the NI products, is that really there are't that many settings to change. Maybe between current loop/voltage and maybe the max/min and you will be able to measure probably 99% of analogue devices. Do they really need to change from a measurement of 0-1V when 0-5v will give near enough the same figures (do they need uV accuracy?) Or will mV do! Don't ask them, you know what the answer will be ). Do we really need to set a 4-20ma current loop when we can use 0-20 (its only an offset start point after all.).
Indeed. And I would much rather spend my programming time making sure they can play with as little as possible, because when they bugger it up, your software will be at fault You'll then spend the next week defending it before they finally admit that maybe they did select the wrong task