Add Control Anchors to Labview

[ngarneski]

.net and many other languages have an intuitive and simple way to allow you to define how a window behaves when you resize it: anchors.  Anchors allow you to define the distance between an edge of a child control and the edge of a parent control regardless of the size of the window. The size of the control itself stays constent unless it violates the rules of the defined anchors in which case it changes sizes to meet those rules. For example a front panel with the following anchors:

 

Would be resized into:

[tst]

You can do this today using panes (at least the specific example in your image), but I agree that this appears to be more intuitive and powerful and it's probably worth examining this as another option.

[manu.NET]

Hello,

You can have a look to this existing idea :

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Advance-docking-and-anchoring-features-in-Labview-fron...

Manu.

[JKSH]

Definitely a step in the right direction!

Setting up anchors becomes cumbersome on complex GUIs though. I suggest extending this idea to include other mechanisms, like automatic layout management and nested layouts (e.g. Column layouts, Row layouts, Grid layouts)

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms951306.aspx for a range of mechanisms to manage resizable GUIs.

[Manzolli]

I like the smart way that yEd behaves.

[JW-JnJ]

Yes, yes, yes. I'm constantly fighting scaling and I hate using panes because one inveitably scrolls after I get rid of scrollbars.

I love this. It's simple and elegant. It allows 4 checkmark menus of "Anchor Left","Anchor Right","Anchor Top","Anchor Bottom".