[Update: NI Bug 974336]
There seems to be a bug in the coercion of data to variant when a cluster contains a single element that is a variant. (original post here).
Note: This bug appears to be very old, going as far back as LV2012. This has been reported to NI in the LV2020 Beta forum. I don't have a Bug ID / CAR yet.
Coerce to Variant Fail (LV2019).vi


 
Note that adding another element to the outer cluster causes the problem to go away.

Maybe others have seen this but I only became aware of it recently so I apologise if there is already a CAR for it.
The following demonstrates a difference in behaviour between LabVIEW 2017 and previous versions (back as far as 2009, maybe further).
The VI registers an event when it starts (in the timeout case) and generates a user event when the Increment button is pressed.
The expected behaviour is that the counter will increment by one every time the button is pressed. This is the case for LabVIEW versions prior to 2017. In 2017, the user event is never fired, nor is there an error emitted by the generate user event.
To get the VI to operate as expected in 2017; change the event refnum tunnel to a shift register. This seems to indicate that the refnum prototype is stomping on the dynamically allocated reference whereas in previous LabVIEW versions it would not. Note also, that when using the shift register, the cases do not need to be "wired through" as would be expected with similar functionality in a normal case statement.
evnt.vi

So sometimes when you do protocol decoding it is convenient to use a variant to store decoded data. For example you might have a 2 bit enumeration that is decoded like this:
00 -> Good
01 -> Bad
10 -> Ugly
11 -> Catastrophic
If you cast the value to an enumeration that contains these values before hand you can see them on the variant control. If you use a Ring you will only see a value. 
I know that the LV flatten to string contains the enumeration strings but the encoding is a bit of a mystery, although it looks like the openg palette has figured some of it out to some degree. But to me it doesn't look like there is any reason i couldn't generate an enum to use inside the scope of a variant. Has anyone done this, or know how to generate the string for this purpose. 

After working on the set cluster element by name xnode, it made me realize i could use the same concept to convert a variant array to a cluster. The technique is actually pretty simple, the xnode generates a case structure for each element in a cluster in cluster order, wherein a bundle by name is used to set the value and an unbundle by name is used to get the type, a variant to data is used to convert the data. This has some benefits over some methods, you are not limited to 255 elements, although that is not usually the case some of us are paranoid that clusterosaurus giganticous will be larger than expected. It also has a draw back  that is that when converting from a variant array all the elements must have unique, non-blank names, and this is usually the case. 

I think this technique (though very brute-force) might be useful for some other things let me know what you guys think.

VariantArrayToCluster.zip

Hey everyone,
 
I am working on a backup function for a test executive.  The backup uses the 'class to XML' vi to create an XML string and then save it to a file to be reloaded later. All of my test specific information lives in the class (or one of it's children).  I like this functionality because it makes backup and reload brainless.  It just works.... until now... I've got a test class for my current tester that's grown rather large.  Everything works fine, until the tester loads some waveform data into either of the waveform arrays.  Without data in this field the class reloads just fine, otherwise if fails and says the XML is corrupted.
 
As you can see in my backup vi I have built in a work around that flattens the waveform arrays to strings, drops them back into the class private data, deletes the waveform arrays and then writes the class.  This works! Much to my surprise both waveform data and the rest of the class data are written to file and reloaded without error.  
 
Does anyone have any knowledge or experience with this? 
 
Cheers,
 
Tim