The Tree- Control and the Multicolumn Listbox support the presentation of a Symbols per row. But there are a lot of cases where there is needed more than one symbol per row. One very common scenario is the display of various states (Calculation completed: Checkmark; Results written to file: Checkmark; Assigned Application to open file: App-Icon...). NI does this already in the "Example Finder" window, so it is obvious there is a need for this feature.
I think it is a good practice to hold a pool of symbols, attached to the control, like NI does currently with the Trees and MCLBs. And for performance reasons there could still be the possibility to determine the columns to be capable to display symbols.
So from the LabVIEW programmers point of view there could be added the following properties / methods:
- Symbol-Displayable Colums (property, read/write), (1D Array I32): Gets or Sets the indices of colums, which can show symbols and reserve space when the property "Visible Items->Symbols Visible" is set to true
- Active Symbol- Column (property, read/write), (I32): Gets or Sets the Column-No which has focus for the next "Item Symbols"-property operation.
- Set Column- Symbols (method, takes an I32 as Index for the Column, takes a 1D-Array of I32 as Symbol-pool indices): shortcut for setting the Property "Active Symbol- Column" followed by setting the Property "Item Symbols".
- Get Column- Symbols (method, takes an I32 as Index for the Column, returns a 1D-Array of I32 as Symbol-pool indices): shortcut for setting the Property "Active Symbol- Column" followed by reading the Property "Item Symbols".
This should provide compatibility to the current handling of symbols since the property "Symbol-Displayable Colums" defaults to [0], so if "Item Symbols" is read or written to, it is meant to use the first column, which is status quo.
Greets, Dave
