Single-Stepping through VIs

While execution highlighting slows the execution of your code, single-stepping allows you to have more control of viewing individual actions of the program.

With execution highlighting, execution slows down, and the code executes until completion. With single-stepping, you can execute a single node at a time, causing the program to pause after the node completes.

You can use single-stepping in three ways: Step In, Step Out, and Step Over. You can find these options in the Debugging tab.

1378 Step In—Display the code and pause execution if a node is a subVI and represents more code. For a node that you cannot open, use this option to highlight the node and pause its execution. For text-based programming nodes, Step-In processes the code row-wise.
1378 Step Out— Complete the execution of the current diagram or subdiagram and pause.
1378 Step Over—Execute a node without stepping into the node and pause at the next node.

While single-stepping, you will notice the following behaviors:

  • When you single-step through code, nodes are highlighted to indicate they are ready to execute.
  • Gray lines appear in a loop or a diagram to indicate that the section of code has finished executing but the program is still running.
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