Why Auto Grow should be enabled

[viSci]

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.

[Yair]

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.

[Val Brown]

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".

[Aristos Queue]

  On 7/14/2009 at 6:29 PM, Val Brown said:

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.

[crelf]

  On 7/14/2009 at 5:52 PM, sachsm said:

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

  On 7/14/2009 at 5:52 PM, sachsm said:

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.

[Yair]

  On 7/14/2009 at 7:16 PM, crelf said:

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.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I'll have to disagree with you all. Autogrow sucks. But that don't matter because it's a configurable option.

[crelf]

  On 7/14/2009 at 7:23 PM, Yair said:

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...

[viSci]

I am not able to get the structuresFadeToDiagramBeneath ini to

do anything. Could someone confirm that this works?

[Francois Normandin]

  On 7/14/2009 at 8:26 PM, sachsm said:

I am not able to get the structuresFadeToDiagramBeneath ini to

do anything. Could someone confirm that this works?

This is what you should get.

But it works only for objects beneath the structure, not hidden inside but out of sight.

[crelf]

  On 7/14/2009 at 8:26 PM, sachsm said:

I am not able to get the structuresFadeToDiagramBeneath ini to do anything.

Heeeeeey - it's not working in 8.6 for me either

[Francois Normandin]

  On 7/14/2009 at 8:57 PM, crelf said:

Heeeeeey - it's not working in 8.6 for me either

Are you sure? I'm on 8.6 too and it works.

[crelf]

  On 7/14/2009 at 9:13 PM, François Normandin said:

Are you sure? I'm on 8.6 too and it works.

Ha! I found the issue: you need to add structuresFadeToDiagramBeneath=TRUE not structuresFadeToDiagramBeneath=FALSE (that's the example that's listed in the LabVIEWwiki).

[Francois Normandin]

If you don't have VI Analyzer toolkit, see if this can help you. With scripting available, we can now definitely build analysis tools of our own.

Test_CheckAutoGrowOff.viFetching info...

(LV 8.6, requires OpenG Rectangle tools)

[Daklu]

  On 7/14/2009 at 7:38 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

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.

  On 7/14/2009 at 7:38 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

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

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

  Quote

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?

[crelf]

  On 7/15/2009 at 6:24 AM, Daklu said:

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.

  On 7/15/2009 at 6:24 AM, Daklu said:

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?

[viSci]

Nice utility, thanks François.

[Antoine Chalons]

  On 7/14/2009 at 9:50 PM, François Normandin said:

With scripting available, we can now definitely build analysis tools of our own.

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.

[Francois Normandin]

  On 7/15/2009 at 2:38 PM, Antoine Châlons said:

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...

[Antoine Chalons]

  On 7/15/2009 at 2:46 PM, François Normandin said:

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

[Daklu]

  On 7/15/2009 at 1:00 PM, crelf said:

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.)

  On 7/15/2009 at 1:00 PM, crelf said:

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.

[crelf]

  On 7/15/2009 at 3:02 PM, Daklu said:

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...

[Michael Aivaliotis]

  On 7/15/2009 at 2:52 PM, Antoine Châlons said:

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

I despise the practice of coloring structures. You guys are hitting all my pet peeves, sheesh.

[Francois Normandin]

  On 7/15/2009 at 5:43 PM, Michael Aivaliotis said:

I despise the practice of coloring structures. You guys are hitting all my pet peeves, sheesh.

I knew it was coming. I remember Darren's olympic rings post last year...

[Daklu]

  On 7/15/2009 at 5:08 PM, crelf said:

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.