Implementing UNDO in my application UI.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I wanted to get some input from the group on how others have implemented "undo" in their LabVIEW applications. Of course this will vary depending on what the application does. However, i wonder if there are any design patterns out there that I could model after. 

[dhakkan]

Never had the need to implement it; so I can't speak to the difficulty of implementation in LabVIEW. The Memento Pattern may fit your needs.

[ensegre]

So far the need occurred to me only in an application whose only undoable part was the assisted filling of a big table. Not being particularly sophisticated, I created a finite depth queue, which stored the last N states of that table. Each value change of that control - enqueue at opposite end a new state. Each call of the user menu 'Undo' - dequeue one value and Property/write Value it back to the table. The table itself was not so big that keeping a few historical copies of it in memory was tallying. As simple as that, but certainly not too representative of an application with a more complex state to be rolled back.

[ShaunR]

I also have not really had to implement undo for a sophisticated application. I have implemented "Restore Ro Default" and limited undo for settings,  configurations and such but have not been called upon for the kinds of undo required for things like drawing. I would imagine the same method could be used though.

I used the SQlite Savepoints for configurations and a default table which could be copied to the main table for "Restore to Default". The latter is an example library in the SQLite Toolkit for LabVIEW. Other similar operations can also be realised like restoring the state of the UI after exiting (form position, controls etc) but that's not really what you are asking here; just an indication of the usefulness of these approaches.

 

Addendum: There is a description of a method for Undo/Redo using SQLite triggers. Automatic Undo/Redo Using SQLite

They over complicated it by doing it in an "Object Oriented" fashion but I might use something similar for the redo while keeping the savepoint method for undo.

Edited July 26, 2021 by ShaunR

[Lipko]

I implemented undo several times in my applications, mainly because I usually do editors.

I did it many ways, usually I check if the data/state changes (after the event structure) and push the data on a FIFO. For most of the time, simply putting all raw data was sufficient. Once (in C win32, not in Labview) I had too much data, so I had to use "command pattern", which means only commands with relevant parameters were pushed on the undo stack and the initial raw data was saved with the undo "object".
It had limited depth (depending on available memory), so the initial datas had to be updated if memory would run out. So the oldest command was performed on the initial data.
Of course in some cases the "parameters" of the commands were bigger data (like paste from clipboard), but it worked pretty well. One caveat: it was quite slow to undo, since all the commands in the command stack had to be sequentially applied on the initial data. If all commands are reverseable without computing errors (which pretty much rules out math operations and delete and such), the stack could re reversely traversed so no slowdown.

Back to labview: I can't really exmplain after all these years what's happening, so I'll just post the code of "the most sophisticated" undo I did. It pushes the complete state to the undo stack, because the data was small (sequence editor). The word "manager" in the name is a bad sign, but here it goes.
Note1: it's implememted in a way that selection changes are not added to the stack, only the last one, or I don't really remember. So you can just ignore the "overwrite" case.
Note2: it's an old code from my newbie times. It fails the single responsibility principle badly,  I think both "undo stack" and "stack index" should be action enginified, the outputs besides "output data" is only for optimizing recalculation of data so simply ignore them.

EDIT: I've found a later implementation, so changed the vi. The data change check is outside the vi.

 

 

pic_man_undo_manager.vi

Edited July 26, 2021 by Lipko

[X___]

I'd just pop up a dialog with a "Please contact our company's support channel and Idea Exchange forum to discuss or request implementation of this feature. Reminder: access to future improvements of our software is reserved to continuing subscribers. Other cheaper and more powerful alternatives may be available".

[Michael Aivaliotis]

2 hours ago, X___ said:

Other cheaper and more powerful alternatives may be available

Having a bad day? 😀

[X___]

1 hour ago, Michael Aivaliotis said:

Having a bad day? 😀

Just reflecting on what some not-to-be-named companies have accustomed us with...

But in answer to your question, if you have irreversible actions taking places (that would be the case in the type of stuff I do, which is mostly computational when it is not DAQ - I don't suppose you want to undo drilling or cutting physical parts 🙂, clearly you need to store intermediates states to be able to backtrack to those and since juggling between different cases might be tricky. this might be your best approach...

And since even the not-to-be-named company has been unable to find a satisfactory solution despite their elite team of programmers after 20 years (not mentioning that there is no undo in tons of locations in the IDE), this is clearly not a trivial problem. But that might be one sentence too much. Hold on, Musk hasn't bought that site yet, has it?

[ShaunR]

35 minutes ago, X___ said:

I don't suppose you want to undo drilling or cutting physical parts

If you can do that, you'd be a billionaire.

[X___]

8 minutes ago, ShaunR said:

If you can do that, you'd be a billionaire.

We are working on it. We just need more funding...

[viSci]

I seem to remember that at one time the LV runtime did support a basic Undo functionality.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

4 hours ago, viSci said:

I seem to remember that at one time the LV runtime did support a basic Undo functionality.

Are you referring to scripting? It still is there and is called Transaction Start and End.

[viSci]

It appears that in a built application, the Undo from the App menu works for all UI control value changes.

Edited May 2, 2022 by viSci

[xiongxinwei]

Undo and Redo implemented in the sequence editor I designed.