Cursor Line Style Creating Ghosts

[MrMattPayne]

I'm seeing that if I programmatically set the cursor line style to anything other than 0, I see the ghosts of the cursor X and Y axes sort of bleed through a tab control when the corresponding graph is on a backgrounded tab. I'll clarify:

I have a test machine that runs multiple different kinds of tests. Each test programmatically formats and updates a single graph on the main GUI which is on a certain tab of a main tab control. Each test VI can update this main graph via the graph's reference which is stored in a global variable. I found this preferable to using a subpanel and trying to standardize the front panels of the various test VI's. The problem is if I'm on any other tab when a test VI formats the cursor line style of the graph, if it sets it to anything other than 0, I see what looks like thin slices of the graph just wider than the cursor lines coming through onto whatever tab I'm actually on. Basically it looks like the cursor lines are being drawn over whatever tab I'm on, even though the horizontal one isn't even visible! They seem to go away after about 2 seconds, but still, it looks awful and buggy.

Does anyone have any ideas how to prevent this? I've tried a few things like setting the graph visible = F, updating the graph, then setting visible = T and that didn't do it. Using defer FP updates doesn't work either. I'm sure I could just not update the graph if that's not the active tab, but then what if I want to switch to that tab after to see the last test? 

[Kyle97330]

Have you tried this with different graph styles to be sure it affects all of them?  Classic, silver, modern, NXG?

If you could share code that reproduces this we could check any ideas we come up with to see if they work...

Without something to try this out on, this is the best idea I have.

Make sure you have auto-grow turned off on the tab control.  When updating each graph, do the following:

1. Set Defer Panel updates on

2. Read the graph's current position on the tab and cache it

3. Move the graph's position on the tab it's on to someplace well offscreen (X = 5000 or something, but not so large it exceeds 16000, to prevent integer overflow)

4. Do the update that causes problems

5. Retrieve the cached position of the graph from before and move the graph back to that position

6. Set Defer Panel updates off

No idea if it will work, but it's something to try...

[MrMattPayne]

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@Kyle97330 wrote:

Have you tried this with different graph styles to be sure it affects all of them?  Classic, silver, modern, NXG?

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Great call! It actually seems to only affect the NXG style, or what apparently is now called "Fuse Design System". Modern, silver, classic, and express do not seem to do this, so I guess the easiest fix is just to use a different waveform graph style! A bit unfortunate, as I like the NXG/Fuse aesthetic, but I'm pretty sure I can format one of the other ones to look as clean.

This is a large program with different VI's acting on each other so I can't really share enough to show the problem, but I'll try and see if I can create an example VI that uses the same methods to get the same effect.

So yeah, NI, if you're listening, your Fuse waveform graphs may be buggy.

Edit: Ok apparently not. So I tested this out by putting all 5 types of graph on the tab, and then just selected one by one which one would be used by passing that reference to the test VI. While they were all there, only the original Fuse style experienced the bug. All other graphs were formatted and displayed the data correctly, no phantom cursors showing up. HOWEVER, once I chose the classic graph and deleted all the others, now it is doing the same thing! The mystery continues...

[MrMattPayne]

Attaching a sample VI that simulates the problem. It performs the same property node operations as the full program, just in one flat independent VI with constant data. It seems you have to at least view the graph once for it to occur, but after that it occurs every time. Version is 2024Q3.