It’s almost time for NIWeek 2011!

I’ve looked over the Session Catalog for this year and there are so many great choices that I’m having a hard time narrowing down my list of recommended sessions. So I’ll limit myself to the sessions relating to user interface design with LabVIEW.

First on my list is, of course, my session, co-presented with Simon Hogg: Customizing NI LabVIEW Controls and Indicators, Tuesday (August 2) at 4:45 PM in 13A/B.

You’re probably thinking, “Sounds like things I’ve heard a million times before,” right? I guarantee not! Simon and I will be demonstrating some secret, unpublished features of the Control Editor that are new in LabVIEW 2011. They’re not quite ready for “prime time,” but we’re willing to let a select few start using them!

Other sessions that I recommend include:

• Building Quality NI LabVIEW User Interfaces, Tuesday (August 2) at 1:00 PM in 13A/B. My colleagues Nitin Thomas and Simon Hogg will cover the broader topic of user interface design in LabVIEW, skipping over customizing controls since that will be covered in my session.
• Flexible GUI for Vibration Analysis with NI LabVIEW, Tuesday (August 2) at 2:15PM in 11B. Jeremy Weiss from Mechanical Solutions, Inc. will talk about making UIs designed for rotating machinery vibration troubleshooting, including the usage of tree controls and subpanels.
• User Interface Tips 2.0, Wednesday (August 3) at 4:45 PM in 13A/B. Jonathan Cohn from Bloomy Controls will provide his tips for making the best user interfaces.
• Introducing NI LabVIEW 2011, Tuesday (August 2) and Wednesday (August 3) at 10:30AM in 13A/B. See all the new features of LabVIEW 2011, including a new style of front panel controls!

Did I miss any sessions you think should be on this list? Please post them in the comments!

There are multiple ways to replace things in your VIs. Knowing your different Replace options can help you choose the one that best fits your needs.

On the front panel, you can right-click on a control and choose one of the options from the Replace menu. This method will preserve some things about the original control. Unfortunately, it’s not obvious what things will be preserved. In most cases, LabVIEW will attempt to preserve the label, caption, value and dataflow direction (control/indicator). It may also try to preserve other things, such as the numeric representation, size or color. It’s hard to say what will be preserved without actually doing the replace.

Luckily, you have Undo if a right-click replace operation doesn’t do you what you want. But what do you try next?

Paste-Replace is a method of replacing a control without preserving any of its appearance attributes. It will, however, preserve things like connector pane placement, wire connection and associated block diagram elements (e.g. local variables and implicitly-linked Property/Method nodes). (By the way, right-click Replace preserves these things as well).

To use Paste-Replace:

1. Place the control you want.
2. Use Edit>>Cut (from the menu, or via keyboard shortcut) to put it on the clipboard.
3. Select the control you want to replace.
4. Use Edit>>Paste.

Note that Paste-Replace is not available when editing the LabVIEW block diagram. On diagrams, you almost always use right-click Replace. However, some structures (such as loops) have special Replace menu options to replace them with other structures without losing their contents.

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I don’t think I can do a better job of showing off the top new features of LabVIEW 2010 than the official New Features in NI LabVIEW 2010 page or Darren’s nuggets.

So instead I’ll share a small enhancement that you may sometimes find handy.

Have you ever needed to refresh your memory (or teach someone else) the differences between the various LabVIEW graphs and charts? Or what data shapes (arrays, clusters, arrays of clusters, etc.) a graph accepts and how it displays them?

You know it’s all described in the Help, but it’s hard to find the right topic for a particular type of graph or chart, right?

Well, in LabVIEW 2010 you can use the Context Help window, mouse over a control and see a “Detailed Help” link that will take you to the help topic for that type of control.

The link only appears when the VI is in edit mode because the context help on a running VI belongs to you, for whatever description of the control you want to provide for the operator of your VI.

A friend asked me “what is the best control to use for a Boolean subVI input that has special true/false values, e.g. enabled/disabled?” She was dissatisfied with the “Enabled?” checkbox approach because it didn’t give an explicit name to the other state. Similarly, using the boolean text part with a switch only showed the name of the current state. She wanted a switch that showed the labels for both states.

I gave her this control and asked if it was what she was looking for. She said that it was!

She had known that you could put free labels next to the switch, but not that you could make them “owned” by the control.

You can add decorative elements (e.g. images, decorations, and text) to a control using the Control Editor (Edit>>Customize Control or right-click Advanced>>Customize). When you add them in the Control Editor, they become parts of the control. Then when you use the control on a front panel, it acts as a single item when moving, deleting, etc.

Now, another thing you should consider when making a subVI input with named states is whether it would be better to use an enumeration. This can make the diagram that calls the subVI easier to read. If you do want an enumeration, however, I highly recommend you make it a type definition as well. That way you can edit it later and automatically update all the places it’s used.

It’s fun sometimes to hear people ask for a feature and be able to show them that it’s already in LabVIEW. (Of course, it’s also disheartening, because I know it’s hard to find things in LabVIEW and I wish I could make it easier).

Just recently, someone requested a way to see a zoomed-out view of an entire block diagram, highlighting the area that was currently visible in the window.

I showed him the Navigation Window (View>>Navigation Window or Ctrl+Shift+N).

LabVIEW Navigation Window

The Navigation Window is a resizable, floating window that shows the active front panel or block diagram. If you click in the Navigation Window, LabVIEW will center the visible region around the point you clicked on.

Note that the Navigation Window does not work on the panel of running VIs, because we don’t want to degrade the VI’s performance.

The Navigation Window has been in LabVIEW since version 7.1.