Create and resize button in a running VI

[Yamaeda]

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@gepponline wrote:

Hi,

 is it possible to create and resize a button in a running vi's front panel?
I would like for example to place a square button where I press mouse down and then, if I drag left and right borders, resize it.
I've done something similar in the past using images, but this time I need buttons to be single objects I can move in a second time

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Kind of. You can't Create buttons, but you can have a hidden one you show, and resize and move is easy.

[gepponline]

The problem Is that I could need hundreds of them 😞

[Bob_Schor]

"If your only tool is a Hammer, every Problem becomes a Nail".

If you need to create 500, or 1000 "hidden buttons", use LabVIEW Scripting and create them.  If you want, you can probably figure out how to place each one at a pre-determined coordinate on your Front Panel, create a function that takes a pair of Coordinates and returns the reference to the Button nearest to that Coordinate, and you can turn the Button "Visible" or "Invisible" at Run-Time.

Or accept that this is not how LabVIEW is intended to be used.  It is a LABoratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench, after all, and few Engineers are building devices (virtual or not) that have constantly-changing Operator Interfaces (or Front Panels).

Bob Schor

[BertMcMahan]

Someone on here (pretty sure it was Aristos Queue) had a toolkit for creating front panels. He used a bunch of "decoy" buttons that he'd show and hide as needed. Adding new buttons actually just added pictures to a picture control, but clicking those sections made the "decoy" button appear under it so it looked like there was a whole lot of buttons. It worked decently well but I don't think he quite finished it, and I'll be darned but I can't find it right now. It was VERY interesting.

Edit: Found it! Warning: this is a pretty advanced way to make a GUI, but it's VERY flexible. I wish this was native to LabVIEW. I think NXG had this, or was planned to have it, but that got scrapped.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/A-more-successful-experiment-in-creating-compositable-user/td-p/127...

[paul_cardinale]

Ya mean like this?

[pincpanter]

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@paul_cardinale  ha scritto:

Ya mean like this?

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Nice, but:

- you need to create controls before running the vi

- it doesn't work with custom controls

- it doesn't work in executables

[gepponline]

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@Bob_Schor  ha scritto:

Or accept that this is not how LabVIEW is intended to be used.  It is a LABoratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench, after all, and few Engineers are building devices (virtual or not) that have constantly-changing Operator Interfaces (or Front Panels).

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I really disagree with this sentence. I use labview since 20 years And I've used it for every kind of application: acquisition, automation, databases, office automation, web services.
It's true, It has some limitations due to its roots, but i think It has the potentiality to become a real all purpose language, so, sometimes i ask for some needs hoping in the meanwhile new features are added.
Like scripting 😉

[gepponline]

It's in v18, I use 17 😞

[pincpanter]

Here it is in LV2015

I added a project and a build specification for an executable.

[gepponline]

Thank you! It could be a nice staring point 😉