Darren's Occasional Nugget 05/18/2007

Question

Reading Jim's post about loop debugging on this LAVA thread reminded me of a similar trick I do with Event Structures.  In my event-based UIs, I always wire the iteration count of the While Loop containing my Event Structure through to the inner border of the Event Structure, like so:
I also deselect the "Use Default if Unwired" option on the output tunnel...that way when I create a new Event case, the VI will be broken, reminding me that I need to wire the iteration wire through on the new case:
Now, the reason I do this little trick is to help when debugging the execution order of events for my event structure.  In my current project, I've got mouse events firing all over the place...Mouse Move, Mouse Enter, Mouse Leave, Mouse Down, Mouse Up, Shortcut Menu Activation, etc.  Sometimes I really need to know the order in which certain events executed...to do this, I can probe these iteration wires within the event cases that interest me, and by comparing the values of the iteration counts, I can easily determine which events fired first.  If the events are firing multiple times and I want a history of their firing order, I can use my home-grown History Probes (see my previous Nugget on this topic).
-D
P.S. - Check out past nuggets here.
Message Edited by Darren on 05-18-2007 10:41 AM
Darren Nattinger, CLA
LabVIEW Artisan and Nugget Penman
Attachments:
iteration_wired_through.png ‏1 KB
use_default_if_unwired.png ‏2 KB

Answer 1

Ah - logging. That's always a nice topic .
I always use a simple selfmade library. So I can get rid of breakpoints (most of the time) and still can "debug" code when it is built as an exe.
Here you can find the library and have a look at it.
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=199742&query.id=144862#M199742
Thomas
Using LV8.0
Don't be afraid to rate a good answer...