Clean up tool w/ "Open 4 Motors"

[Clayton Yocom]

I've noticed when using the "cleanup tool" (as I will be referring to it) with polymorphic(?) vi's, the option box to change the type of vi (such as Jaguar/Victor in this case) does not extend the box's physical shape therefore lets the option box overlap things.

See this example.

Quite annoying when trying to make things look pretty . Not sure where/how to post this "bug" of sorts, so any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[Wolfgang]

Just don't use the clean up tool. We don't, because we are not sure if the code we have is perfect. If you use the cleanup tool, the biggest change is that your code is compacted into small space, making editing the code difficult. Don't use the clean up tool.

[Clayton Yocom]

The cleanup tool is decent if your lazy and dislike using a touch-pad (without a usb mouse in the shop) XD

The biggest reason we use it, personally, is because when we think up this code, we don't really make it readable for the rest of the programming students that weren't there. I am stressing to our other programming students that it is important to understand every bit of code that goes onto the robot, so that when something goes wrong, you know what went wrong so you can quickly identify the problem and fix it, wither it be mechanical, electrical, or within the programming. (and to teach them so they get the same experiance into LabVIEW as everyone else.)

[WizenedEE]

Originally Posted by Wolfgang

Just don't use the clean up tool. We don't, because we are not sure if the code we have is perfect. If you use the cleanup tool, the biggest change is that your code is compacted into small space, making editing the code difficult. Don't use the clean up tool.

The thing is, it also expands code. What I generally do is use the tool, then just throw in another vi in the middle, wire it up by feel and then use it again and see if the wires go to the right places.

If I wanted to add another vi without using the tool, I'd have to move all of the code on one side over some more and make more space.

And yes, the ignorance of the polymorphic vis is annoying.

[SuperS_5]

Hello community,
In my daily LabVIEW work we generally don't use the clean-up tool. (Sometimes called the block diagram scrambler, because of the behavior when it was first introduced.) It works fairly well for small amounts of code. So new after a bit of tuning in the options page, I will sometimes use it after creating a new subVI. It helps promote coding standards. It was once used on a very, very large VI, and it was not pretty. (Inadvertently saved too before our use of source control) In the newer versions of LabVIEW this tool has more options. Chunks of code can be excluded from the clean-up, and the clean-up can be done on small selections of code instead of the whole VI. (FRC has stuck to LV 8.6, which excludes the new options.)

[Doug Norman]

Originally Posted by Wolfgang

Just don't use the clean up tool. We don't, because we are not sure if the code we have is perfect. If you use the cleanup tool, the biggest change is that your code is compacted into small space, making editing the code difficult. Don't use the clean up tool.

In case you aren't aware. On the LabVIEW diagram you can Ctrl drag to grow space. By that I mean hold down the Ctrl key and drag your mouse. You can also Ctrl+Z to undo if you don't like how it moves things.

[Mark McLeod]

I use the cleanup diagram tool all the time when I'm looking for errors in code posted by other people.

Often the code is so much spaghetti that it's hard to follow as masses of wires disappear off the screen, cross behind other icons, and get spread to all corners of the block diagram.

It doesn't have to be permanent if you don't like what it does.
As Doug said, cntl Z resets everything.

[Clayton Yocom]

Back on topic, is there a way to change the way it handles polymorphic VI's or is it on the "known issues" list or something? Just wana know how to handle small glitches in LabVIEW from now on.

[Greg McKaskle]

My suspicion is that the overlapped poly selectors is more of a bug than anything else. If you open Tools>>Options and go to the Diagram Cleanup page, you can experiment with bigger values for Horizontal, and perhaps manual tuning, but I suspect that this was an oversight since 8.6 was the first official release of the layout feature. I expect it will be better next year.

Greg McKaskle

[Clayton Yocom]

Thanks Greg, that answers everything I had questions about. We'll check out the Diagram cleanup options to make it fit better, because it is quite annoying :/

Thanks again everyone!