Cool new LabVIEW features - Clean up diagram portion

[Joe Ross]

Next year, LabVIEW is being updated to LabVIEW 2011. The previous version of LabVIEW for FRC was version 8.6, released in 2008. There have been a lot of neat features released in LabVIEW in the last 3 years. I intend to highlight several of these features that I think are relevant to FIRST. Look for more posts in the upcoming months.


With LabVIEW 8.6, NI introduced the clean up diagrams button. For small diagrams, I thought it worked great at cleaning up my messy diagrams. However, the larger and more complicated the diagram got, the worse it handled it. Now, you can select just a portion of the diagram, and it will only clean up the selection. In my testing, it works great for the smaller selections, without completely ruining the full diagram.

[SuperS_5]

You can also do the opposite, and choose what NOT to clean up. It works on most (all?) of the structure nodes. (Eg. Case structures, and loops.) Right click on the the structure and click "Exclude from diagram cleanup." From now on, when you use the Diagram clean up on the whole VI, this node, and everything inside no longer gets "scrambled."

Between the exclude from clean up feature, and the clean up selection feature, the clean up block diagram function becomes actually handy. (No longer just called the VI scrambler.)

[Aren Siekmeier]

What's funny is I used to just do this by copying the relevant section of the code into a new VI and hitting the cleanup button, and then copying it back over.... I must say this will make life easier.

[SuperS_5]

I actually don't use it much on my own VIs. I insist that we make clean code form the start. This tool is definitely handy to fix VIs that come from other people.

[Sconrad]

Does anybody else use Ctrl+u to do the clean up diagram? That was how my team's programmers and I first learned it and for the life of us we could never figure out why u was chosen. We settled for calling the function "Undirty "

[Greg McKaskle]

Seeing as how the LV editor has been around for 25 years, it isn't uncommon for new features to be given a shortcut key based on what is left. Mnemonics are great, but at some point all the good stuff is taken.

Greg McKaskle