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Why Auto Grow should be enabled


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Greetings one and all, As my first post on the new LAVA site I would like to offer a public service announcement to help others avoid the difficulty I have gone through the past 4 hours.  Up until today I found the Auto Grow feature to be annoying and disabled it.  But lo and behold it was 2 subvi's hidden in a diagram disable structure that were causing my problem.  It occurred to me that this is a nasty pitfall of graphical programming that has always existed prior to Auto Grow.  So do yourself a favor and leave Auto Grow Enabled!  Perhaps in the future structures could have a simple indication if any objects are outside of its visual boundary.

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I definitely agree. I leave it on and think it's very important.

Another way of handling something like this is by running the relevant VI analyzer test (assuming you have VI analyzer, of course, and are willing to only find something like this retroactively).

I actually like your idea of highlighting such a structure somehow. You should probably suggest it in NI's idea exchange.

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From what I've been reading it sounds like this could be a scripting issue, perhaps even a right-click add-on: viz, to search the entire project for items beyond the boundaries of a structure and report that location, along with the number of items that are "hidden".

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From what I've been reading it sounds like this could be a scripting issue, perhaps even a right-click add-on: viz, to search the entire project for items beyond the boundaries of a structure and report that location, along with the number of items that are "hidden".

VI Analyzer has a test that looks for this.
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But lo and behold it was 2 subvi's hidden in a diagram disable structure that were causing my problem.

LabVIEWwiki.org to the rescue! There's a really neat undocumented labview.ini key that'll show hidden stuff (kinda grayed out): structuresFadeToDiagramBeneath

So do yourself a favor and leave Auto Grow Enabled!

I always leave it on - the only time it bothers me is when I'm typing in a string constant (like editing a format string) that's really long and it pushes the structure out as I'm typing. Other than that, I always use it.

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I always leave it on - the only time it bothers me is when I'm typing in a string constant that's really long and it pushes the structure out as I'm typing.

Click Shift+Enter when you get to the end of the area and the string constant will become a multi-line string. Unfortunately, that doesn't work with comments, where it's much more commonly needed.

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Click Shift+Enter when you get to the end of the area and the string constant will become a multi-line string.

Doing so doesn't add any \ characters to the string? That's a neat trick! Now all I need it a keyboard combination that switches the justification while I'm typing...

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I'll have to disagree with you all. Autogrow sucks.

Nailed it. I hate autogrow. I've spent far too much time rearranging block diagrams that autogrow (and various other 'features') has screwed up.

But that don't matter because it's a configurable option.

Well that's no way to engage in a flame war. wink.gif

But lo and behold it was 2 subvi's hidden in a diagram disable structure that were causing my problem.

I'm curious... exactly what error were you seeing from having vis in a diagram disable structure?

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Nailed it. I hate autogrow. I've spent far too much time rearranging block diagrams that autogrow (and various other 'features') has screwed up.

You probably don't use the autotool either - shelia.

I'm curious... exactly what error were you seeing from having vis in a diagram disable structure?

It was probably code in the enabled case of a disable structure?

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with a little work this could be added to the RCF as "enable / disable auto grow on all structures" on a VI and its hierarchy.

;)

I agree.

I never found the property to change the frame color programmatically. I think it's not exposed... otherwise I would have colored it red to indicate there was something hidden...

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I agree.

I never found the property to change the frame color programmatically. I think it's not exposed... otherwise I would have colored it red to indicate there was something hidden...

I'll ask NI to expose this property!

I am used to change the colour of my case structures when I change the case sensitiveness :-o

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You probably don't use the autotool either - shelia.

Actually I do use the autotool - betty. (I started with LV8.2 so I never got used to tabbing through the tools.)

It was probably code in the enabled case of a disable structure?

If so, it should have been easy to find using the Show Error button on the Error List dialog.

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If so, it should have been easy to find using the Show Error button on the Error List dialog.

Only if that code actually had an error that would show up - it's possible that the code in there, as far as LabVIEw is concerned, ran fine, but it produced unexpected results as far as the operation of the VI is was in is concerned. eg: put a VI in the enabled case of a disable structure that deletes all the files in your "My Documents" folder, then hide the structure: LabVIEW'll still run it...

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Only if that code actually had an error that would show up - it's possible that the code in there, as far as LabVIEw is concerned, ran fine, but it produced unexpected results as far as the operation of the VI is was in is concerned. eg: put a VI in the enabled case of a disable structure that deletes all the files in your "My Documents" folder, then hide the structure: LabVIEW'll still run it...

That's true, the OP didn't say his VI was broken, only that 2 VIs causing the problem were hidden. Although even in that case execution highlighting should have revealed the VIs. I did have an issue recently where some VIs in a diagram disable structure's disabled case were causing project file links that shouldn't have been there.

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