progress report #1 - the block diagram cleanup experiment.pdf

8/12/2019 Progress Report #1 - The Block Diagram Cleanup Experiment.pdf

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My experiences coding with National Instruments' LabVIEW programming language

Posted by Darren Nattingerat 12:11 AM

Progress Report #1 - The Block Diagram Cleanup Experiment

As I mentioned a few months ago, I am attempting to use Block Diagram Cleanup for 100% of my

diagram arrangement needs in LabVIEW 2009. I figured I might post updates every once in a while

detailing my progress. So here, in no particular order, are some of my observations and impressions

after heavy use of block diagram cleanup for a few months:

It Creates Big Diagrams- When left to my own devices, I create tight diagrams with very

little whitespace. I have very quickly discovered that diagram cleanup is rather liberal with

its allocation of whitespace. :) Typically this is because I've got a moderately nested

diagram, and diagram cleanup doesn't quite know how to allocate space in each frame o f

a multiframe structure such that whitespace is minimized. I imagine this would be a rather

difficult problem to solve, since it would require the repositioning algorithm to

simultaneously keep track of the spacing in each frame of a multiframe structure.

It Doesn't Respect My Window Size- Along similar lines, the diagram gets resized and

often goes past the height and/or width of the diagram window. Sometimes I have diagram

windows set to a particular size for a reason, and if I were arranging the diagram myself, I

would fit the diagram within those window bounds. I wish we could constrain diagram

cleanup to the current diagram's window bounds.

It Creates Bendy Wires- I've always been very careful to minimize the number of bends

in my wires, maybe because my boss was always very picky about it. In fact, he's the one

who insisted "Wire Bends" be a test that shipped with VI Analyzer1.0! Anyway, diagram

cleanup doesn't seem to be so concerned about wire bends. From what little I know about

the cleanup algorithm, this makes sense because the algorithm is very much concerned

with node placement, and not so much wire placement (except for its strict insistence on

keeping error wires straight, which I like). But if you've got nodes that you've arranged just

to keep non-error wires straight, diagram cleanup will not take this into account when

rearranging. Also, if you've got constants wired to things, and you've got the constants

positioned to minimize wire bends, I frequently see the constant moved, and wires bent asa result.

It Moves My Control Terminal Labels- I like my control terminals on the sides (left for

controls, right for indicators)...in fact, I added the Ctrl-Space-Ctrl-Tshortcut in LabVIEW

2009 to make it easier to perform this operation in bulk for all top-level terminals on the

diagram. But I've noticed my terminal labels get moved by cleanup, and it doesn't look like

something that's configurable.

But...I Code Faster- Despite its shortcomings, block diagram cleanup allows me to code

*much* faster than I do when arranging the diagram myself. I don't have any specifics, but

I'd estimate that I write VIs about twice as fast as normal when I spend zero time arranging

diagram objects myself.

These are my first impressions of block diagram cleanup, with just a few months of LabVIEW 2009

development (on a mishmash of small projects). But right now, I'm in the beginning stages of writing a

LabVIEW Class-based prototype for a LabVIEW Scriptingarchitecture for my current project. I hopeto post more detailed observations as I become more involved in this adventure.

6 comments:

YairOctober 27, 2009 at 1:14 PM

The diagram explosion and overly bent wires are definitely what I find to be the biggest pain

points.

What's particularly annoying about the wires is that there's no good reason for them to have

multiple bends. If you invoke a manual cleanup on the wire, it usually comes out with

IEW Artisan: Progress Report #1 - The Block Diagram Cleanup Ex... http://labviewartisan.blogspot.in/2009/10/progress-report-1-bloc

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considerably fewer bends. It seems to me that if the algorithm called a cleanup on each wire

after it finished cleaning, the result would be better (although this might hurt performance).

Reply

TonPlomp October 29, 2009 at 1:55 PM

Fun experiment:

Create a control and indicator of matching type.

Line these two up.

Create an exesive bendy wire in between.

Only select the wire with triple-click.Select auto-cleanup.

In LabVIEW 2009, this action is a no-op.

Ton

Reply

Darren Nattinger October 29, 2009 at 2:01 PM

Ton,

That's expected behavior to me, since Diagram Cleanup is focused on node placement, and

not wire placement. If you take any arbitrary diagram and multi-select an arbitrary number of

wires, I'm pretty sure you'll see a no-op there as well.

Reply

Steve Bird October 30, 2009 at 8:06 AM

I haven't moved my client to LV2009 yet, so I haven't used the Code Cleanup 2009 myself.

But if expands the diagrams, bends the wires and moves the labels where IT wants to, then I

still have to go along behind it and clean things up to fit my own standards.

If that's the case, I don't see how I could get to the "twice as fast" point, as you have.

What does it actually do FOR you, that saves you that much time?

Reply

Darren Nattinger October 30, 2009 at 11:22 AM

I'm not going back to clean up after it. I'm basically declaring its results "clean enough". That's

how I'm twice as fast now. And I'm sending feedback to the diagram cleanup team on th ings I

would like to see it do better (like all the stuff in this blog post).

Reply

Anonymous January 15, 2010 at 12:02 PM

I have found that if you select a case structure and clean it up by itself, the case is small.

Then if you right-click on it and disable cleanup on that case structure, then cleanup the next

outer loop, the inner one stays tight. Then you can progressivly cleanup your code without so

much sprawl.

Reply


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