Architecture for stopping calculation if new data comes in

[infinitenothing]

Is this a good way to stop a calculation midstream if you get a new input?

 

[hooovahh]

The sequence structure you have shown there is likely a whole lot of stuff right?  Is it a single subVI that takes a long time to return?  If so pass the queue reference into it and check there.  Then in your subVI use a state machine architecture that periodically checks to see the size of the queue.  A more clunky solution could also be to call the Calculate subVI as an asynchronous process, and then abort it if your queue gets an element.

[hooovahh]

Okay here is an example of the abort technique.  Attached is a VI that will perform an Add every time a button is pressed, but the add takes 2 seconds to operate.  If you click Add within the 2 seconds, it aborts the current add, and then process the new add that was requested.  Keep in mind aborting a VI like this can have bad consequences depending on what is happening.  You shouldn't just abort a VI that is dealing with references.  You should go through a cleanup process.  Of course you could just pass references already opened in to this VI and I think things would still be fine.

Abort Test.zip

[infinitenothing]

In my example I was trying to show that the for loop (which could be made a subVI) took a long time but the individual iterations of the for loop were relatively fast. I was more curious about what other people have done because I almost never use the queue status VI.

The "abort" option does sound clunky. There wouldn't be a way for the SubVI to perform post cleanup operations

[hooovahh]

Oh now it's clear.  I thought you had the for loop in there processing multiple items for some reason.  In that case I'd say that's a perfectly fine way to check for an abort condition, and then stop if a new request comes in.  The abort example really only seemed like a good idea in an example like the one I posted.  Where maybe you were doing some image processing to display to the user, which might take a long time, where a purely computational operation could be aborted without any concern.