Darren

You may want to consider using a Data Agnostic Smart Probe instead of a subVI. From that probe, you can get a reference to the calling VI. And I think there are ways to figure out which probes are on which wires, etc. Here's my nugget post on Data Agnostic Smart Probes: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Darren-s-Occasional-Nugget-02-23-2018/m-p/3759109

The official VIs are different implementations. I imagine they're faster, since their implementation is simpler (they just wrap Spreadsheet String to Array and Array to Spreadsheet String). Also the new VIs have the standard connector pane and official icons. You shouldn't have any issue continuing to use the hidden gems if you prefer those.

No problem, I just want to make sure people know the difference between "Darren the G programmer says _____" and "Darren the NI employee says _____". In my "Don't Wait for LabVIEW R&D... Implement Your Own LabVIEW Features!" presentation, after I clarify that I'm presenting my personal opinion and not an official NI position, I contraindicate XControls because of numerous stability issues I've seen with them in large applications over the years. You can see my slides and watch a recording of the presentation here: http://bit.ly/dnattlvhooks

Side note: I tried to look at the code, but I couldn't manage to get the snippets dragged into a LV 2019 diagram. Is there something special I have to do to download the .pngs so that they have the LV meta data necessary to make the snippet be droppable code?

Variant attributes were optimized quite a bit over the years. For string-based keys, they are very efficient, especially if you don't need to cast to/from variant for the values.

You don't need to type cast to string when using maps. Change the keys in your Map code to be U64s instead of strings and let's see the benchmarks. Type casting is expensive. One of the benefits of using the map data type is that you no longer are forced to use strings as your keys.

One of those employees is me, but I am always clear when I discuss this topic that my recommendation against XControls is my personal opinion and is not an official NI position.

I read it the opposite way, he has c:\a\b\c and just needs c:\a or c:\a\b. In those cases, you would use Strip Path.

Seems like the checkboxes aren't even necessary if you're only picking one class to inherit from. Just pick a row in the tree and click Next.

I've added that property to a list I'm maintaining of private properties/methods/events to move to public/scripting in a future LabVIEW release.

I don't think there's a way to do it. You'll need to make your own browse button.

No.

I prefer Torchy's.

Yeah, I'm not aware of any. The App Builder API (vi.lib\AppBuilder\AB_API) provides most of the functionality you would need to programmatically modify build specs. I talk about it briefly in my Hidden Gems presentation: http://www.ni.com/hiddengems

Here's a GIF comparing the selection drag + scroll speed on the same large VI in 2018 and the latest 2019 build, both on my dev machine.

(standard disclaimer, unreleased software, not an official benchmark, etc. etc.) I just tested dragging selection boxes on that diagram in LabVIEW 2018 and in the latest LabVIEW 2019 build. Selection rectangles draw significantly faster in 2019. Window scrolling while dragging a selection box is also much faster. For reference, my dev machine is Win7-64, 16 GB RAM, E5-1650 3.5GHz.

Not in 2019. But we will look into consolidating the API in 2020 so the non-deprecated method is able to set dotted properties like the deprecated property can.

If I recall correctly, it was deprecated because the current property is more explicit about how you're assigning the property name (ID, short name, long name), whereas the deprecated property was more ambiguous (you could wire in any of them I think). But to my knowledge, there's no problem using the deprecated property. When I update the VI Server Rename plugin, I'll make sure to only call the deprecated property if there's a period in the specified property name.

Thanks for digging this up, Paul. I got it to work for dotted properties of multiple levels (so not only Label.Text, but also things like Terminal.Wire.Terms[]). I'm going to try to update the VI Server Rename plugin for Quick Drop to allow setting dotted properties by using this deprecated property. (?)

You can also use Quick Drop Replace to replace multiple items at once. Select all the controls you want to replace > Ctrl-Space > Type name of new item > Ctrl-P to replace them all.

I had no idea this existed. I will look into it.

Correct. Scripting does not support setting dotted properties.

+1 for installing shared dependencies in vi.lib with VIPM packages. Makes this sort of thing much easier to manage than having each project have their own copy of the reuse code.

From what I can tell, the Item Close(?) and Item Open(?) events are not private. Maybe they were in a previous LabVIEW release?

Ah, there's the piece I was missing. Thanks for those details. I have filed CAR 711518 on this issue. I agree that it is a significant usability concern that it is so easy to wire to that null reference terminal, have code that doesn't function correctly, and not have an indication as to why.