Description and Tip

[Gary Rubin]

I was just thinking it would be nice if a wire or other BD object had a slightly different appearance to indicate whether there is a Description and/or Tip associated with it.

Does LabVIEW 8.x do this?

Thanks,

Gary

[orko]

QUOTE(Gary Rubin @ Jun 19 2007, 11:14 AM)

I was just thinking it would be nice if a wire or other BD object had a slightly different appearance to indicate whether there is a Description and/or Tip associated with it.

Does LabVIEW 8.x do this?

Thanks,

Gary

No, LV 8.x BD objects look identical whether or not they have a description and/or tip. There are a few ways you can get this information though.

1) If you have the context help on, you can mouse over the objects and see the descriptions

2) If you do a find/replace with a regular expression of "^.+" (without the quotes) and filter just on the front panel and description (under more options), you can see which objects have anything in their descriptions or tips.

3) Programmatically, you could list them by checking for an empty string in the "Description" or "Tip Strip" properties.

Hope this helps.

[Gary Rubin]

QUOTE(orko @ Jun 19 2007, 03:48 PM)

No, LV 8.x BD objects look identical whether or not they have a description and/or tip. There are a few ways you can get this information though.

1) If you have the context help on, you can mouse over the objects and see the descriptions

2) If you do a find/replace with a regular expression of "^.+" (without the quotes) and filter just on the front panel and description (under more options), you can see which objects have anything in their descriptions or tips.

3) Programmatically, you could list them by checking for an empty string in the "Description" or "Tip Strip" properties.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

I was looking for something other than #1, as it'd be a pain to mouse-over everything. Also, it doesn't seem to work on structures in 7.1.1. I see the context help for the structure, but it doesn't include my description like it does for other objects.

Number 2 is an interesting trick. What exactly does that funky-looking string refer to?

Thanks again,

Gary

[Justin Goeres]

QUOTE(Gary Rubin @ Jun 19 2007, 11:57 AM)

Number 2 is an interesting trick. What exactly does that funky-looking string refer to?

Welcome to the wonderful, wacky world of regular expressions.

^ means "whatever matches this regular expression has to be located at the beginning of the string"

. means "match any character"

+ means "match whatever is before this, 1 or more times"

(it works just like the http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361B-01/glang/match_pattern/' target="_blank">Match Pattern function.)

So ^.+ literally means "match any number of characters (but at least one), located at the beginning of a string." Practically, if I'm not mistaken it will match anything except an empty string. The result is that the suggested search will find all the Description fields that are non-empty.

I think you could probably get by with just .+ as well. I don't think the ^ really adds anything in this case.

The dialog doesn't exactly make it clear that the suggested settings will search Tips and not just Descriptions, but they do.

[orko]

QUOTE(Gary Rubin @ Jun 19 2007, 12:57 PM)

What exactly does that funky-looking string refer to?

Refer to the help for "Match Pattern, special characters" for a lot more info

Looks like Justin beat me to it, and he is correct in that "^.+" means: "Match any one or more characters at the start of the string", which will give you any match that isn't empty. The only reason I had to do that is that the Find utility in LabVIEW doesn't allow you to search for empty matches (which would be useful here!).

And yes, this will search the tips as well.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I would add this to the wish list. It would be nice to have a little icon next to the object like a little mini post-it note. Then by clicking this it would popup a little description overlay (no stupid modal dialog).

[Yair]

QUOTE(Michael_Aivaliotis @ Jun 20 2007, 10:56 AM)

Then by clicking this it would popup a little description overlay (no stupid modal dialog).

Been looking at a lot of Ajax interfaces recently?

[SULLutions]

QUOTE (Gary Rubin @ Jun 19 2007, 03:57 PM)

... Also, it doesn't seem to work on structures in 7.1.1. I see the context help for the structure, but it doesn't include my description like it does for other objects...

When I add a description to a structure, I overwrite the structure label. I either mention the existence of the description there or color the label distinctively and indicate the meaning of that coloring elsewhere on the diagram. That way I at least know which of my own structures have been commented. An automatic flag would be much better, but for now...