LabVIEW
Controls disappear under LV8.5
I have a program I created 4 years ago that I recently updated to a better program philosophy. I did most of the update in LV8.2 and then upgraded LV to 8.5.
Everything was going fine but when I was collecting a large data set (~52M samples), there was a blink like another window received brief focus and then a strange subset of controls on my front panel disappeared. Their visibility wasn't changed, but they were just not visible (if that makes any sense). I could still activate the button (which wouldn't be the case if the visibility was set to false), but it wasn't showing up.
I've attached 4 screen shots: 1) how the program looks normally [in next post due to three attachment limit], 2) after the controls disappeared 3) after running the mouse over the disappeared controls and 4) after shift-selecting the disappeared controls. As you can see, shift selecting brought back a few (more or less) but not completely and some still didn't show up. This machine is a brand new Vista x64 machine with updated video drivers. I thought that maybe Vista's spotty compatibility was to blame, but when I opened the backup archive file on an XP Pro machine w/ LV8.5, the same controls were gone on that one too. That made me think it wasn't some memory corruption during the large data set acquisition. I would also think it only has to do with the 3D OpenGL button graphics (since the graph tools palette is also missing), but there's a simple numerical control below the 'Points Fetched' control that is missing too and that doesn't use a 3D graphic, and there's 4 3D buttons that didn't disappear too.
I went back to the development computer and ran the program and as I used each of the controls, they seemed to come back, but only one graphic at a time (for instance, if you enter a number, the number display comes back, but you have to click on the increment/decrement buttons to make them appear). After accidentally clicking the 'change directory' button and pressing cancel, it seemed the remaining controls I hadn't used came back. I saved, closed LV, and restarted the application and it seemed to have stuck. Unfortunately, I don't have the hardware necessary to run the program on the archive computer so the controls are still invisible on that one.
The only thing I've been able to find that even remotely looks like this problem is this post, but that deals with TestStand and a CFormView structure. The only thing I can think of that would be funny in this program is that these controls at the bottom of the front panel are actually inside a tab control colored to be transparent. The controls for auto acquisition are in another page and pressing the 'Auto Acquisition' button makes the page change. But changing pages, deleting the tab and undoing, duplicating the page, none of it seems to have any effect on the disappeared controls on the archive copy (now that the main one seems to have fixed itself).
The only thing I'm left with is that something changed with the graphics from LV8.2 (in which I spent ~3-4 months of development time w/ no problems) to LV8.5.
Please, if anyone has any idea what might be going on, this is on a computer that is shipping next week and I can't afford to have such a disastrous intermittant problem go out the door.
Thanks,
Matt Lang
P.S. - one other funny thing about LV8.5 for me (presumably unrelated to the more critical problem above) is that I can't seem to search for text withing a VI. I can press 'search' but it sits there w/ the wait icon forever. This happens on both the Vista x64 and XP Pro machine.
P.P.S. - Ok, apparently NI's forum server is having difficulty letting me edit this post to include a concatenated picture so I can leave the posting w/ zero replies to garner more attention. I'll post the original 'normal' picture w/ my reply as soon as someone responds.
Message Edited by mlang on 01-31-2008 10:26 PM
Message Edited by mlang on 01-31-2008 10:26 PM
Everything was going fine but when I was collecting a large data set (~52M samples), there was a blink like another window received brief focus and then a strange subset of controls on my front panel disappeared. Their visibility wasn't changed, but they were just not visible (if that makes any sense). I could still activate the button (which wouldn't be the case if the visibility was set to false), but it wasn't showing up.
I've attached 4 screen shots: 1) how the program looks normally [in next post due to three attachment limit], 2) after the controls disappeared 3) after running the mouse over the disappeared controls and 4) after shift-selecting the disappeared controls. As you can see, shift selecting brought back a few (more or less) but not completely and some still didn't show up. This machine is a brand new Vista x64 machine with updated video drivers. I thought that maybe Vista's spotty compatibility was to blame, but when I opened the backup archive file on an XP Pro machine w/ LV8.5, the same controls were gone on that one too. That made me think it wasn't some memory corruption during the large data set acquisition. I would also think it only has to do with the 3D OpenGL button graphics (since the graph tools palette is also missing), but there's a simple numerical control below the 'Points Fetched' control that is missing too and that doesn't use a 3D graphic, and there's 4 3D buttons that didn't disappear too.
I went back to the development computer and ran the program and as I used each of the controls, they seemed to come back, but only one graphic at a time (for instance, if you enter a number, the number display comes back, but you have to click on the increment/decrement buttons to make them appear). After accidentally clicking the 'change directory' button and pressing cancel, it seemed the remaining controls I hadn't used came back. I saved, closed LV, and restarted the application and it seemed to have stuck. Unfortunately, I don't have the hardware necessary to run the program on the archive computer so the controls are still invisible on that one.
The only thing I've been able to find that even remotely looks like this problem is this post, but that deals with TestStand and a CFormView structure. The only thing I can think of that would be funny in this program is that these controls at the bottom of the front panel are actually inside a tab control colored to be transparent. The controls for auto acquisition are in another page and pressing the 'Auto Acquisition' button makes the page change. But changing pages, deleting the tab and undoing, duplicating the page, none of it seems to have any effect on the disappeared controls on the archive copy (now that the main one seems to have fixed itself).
The only thing I'm left with is that something changed with the graphics from LV8.2 (in which I spent ~3-4 months of development time w/ no problems) to LV8.5.
Please, if anyone has any idea what might be going on, this is on a computer that is shipping next week and I can't afford to have such a disastrous intermittant problem go out the door.
Thanks,
Matt Lang
P.S. - one other funny thing about LV8.5 for me (presumably unrelated to the more critical problem above) is that I can't seem to search for text withing a VI. I can press 'search' but it sits there w/ the wait icon forever. This happens on both the Vista x64 and XP Pro machine.
P.P.S. - Ok, apparently NI's forum server is having difficulty letting me edit this post to include a concatenated picture so I can leave the posting w/ zero replies to garner more attention. I'll post the original 'normal' picture w/ my reply as soon as someone responds.
Message Edited by mlang on 01-31-2008 10:26 PM
Message Edited by mlang on 01-31-2008 10:26 PM
