LabVIEW
DynaPanels: Now we can place controls dynamically
Interesting idea, but.....
It does not work for me. I can drop controls in the report but they always go into the top left corner overlapping each other. There seems no way for me to move them on the report panel. The "Show Resize <something>" (don't remember the exact naming) does change to Hide .... but does not do anything.
As a closed application (with more controls than the demo) it will have very limited usefullness but as toolkit it will require a specific application framework that allows instantiating your dynamic control VIs. Integrating that into a user application won't be trivial.
I'm not convinced dynamic runtime controls are very useful. In the past if we needed something like that we simply created panels that could be reinstantiated as many times as desired. That could result in a bunch of panels floating around on the screen but personally I prefer that above any constrained MDI (multiple document interface) like design.
The dynamic data connection is neat but only really useful if you allow programmatic access to it too.
Rolf Kalbermatter
rolfk wrote:Interesting idea, but.....
There seems no way for me to move them on the report panel.
For moving the control press and hold down SHIFT key on your keyboard and then drag control with mouse.
rolfk wrote:
As a closed application (with more controls than the demo) it will have very limited usefullness but as toolkit it will require a specific application framework that allows instantiating your dynamic control VIs. Integrating that into a user application won't be trivial.
It is not intended to be used as a close application.as far as programming and PC performance goes i didnt found any considerable impact with 100+ controls working simultaneously. as far as aestheics and user friendlyness goes, definately there is alimitation on how many controls we can place. however same limitation is present in normal design of vi.
Integrating this into application is really very simple. All you have to do is use one vi for publishing a variable in your application.
the vi has two inputs one is variable name and other is data. the data is of variant type so that it can access any data type. it is almost same as writing to global variable. if you have variable assigned to a control(s). data is given to appropriate controls else it just gets ignored. also with minor modifications we can dynamically assign shared variable to controls as well
rolfk wrote:
I'm not convinced dynamic runtime controls are very useful. In the past if we needed something like that we simply created panels that could be reinstantiated as many times as desired. That could result in a bunch of panels floating around on the screen but personally I prefer that above any constrained MDI (multiple document interface) like design.
each control is actually a VI. personally i dont like multiple panels floating all around the screen(unless they are very few) they often overlap each other and manageing dozens of open windows is a problem for me. i even find it hard to manage 15-20 vi panels and block diagrams when i am programming. thats why i came up with this.
Tushar Jambhekar wrote:each control is actually a VI. personally i dont like multiple panels floating all around the screen(unless they are very few) they often overlap each other and manageing dozens of open windows is a problem for me. i even find it hard to manage 15-20 vi panels and block diagrams when i am programming. thats why i came up with this.
Well I'm the opposite. I HATE MDI applications. That includes Visual Studio from Microsoft although there you can tear of the different subparts into floater windows.
I guess this could be a certain conditioning. When I started with windowed OS, Windows was not really any standard at all, and Macintosh OS was the standard. There MDI was basically unknown since Apple hat declared it a bad UI choice and not added any built in OS support for it. That meant almost nobody did it. Well I think Microsoft tried but it didn't really stick.
And there must be a good reason that even Microsoft moved away from MDI in its office suite. If you open multiple documents in Word you have multiple windows, one for each document.
Rolf Kalbermatter
While it uses MDI below the surface, it's not really a MDI application.
It's an interesting idea to be able to dynamically create and link controls and indicators and there is probably some use. I thought it's pretty neat. 🙂
altenbach wrote:While it uses MDI below the surface, it's not really a MDI application.
It's an interesting idea to be able to dynamically create and link controls and indicators and there is probably some use. I thought it's pretty neat. 🙂
Yes, it does not use MDI in the sense as what Windows implements and it is not MDI in that sense either. The solutions we did in the past where also not floating windows for a single control, but instead a floating window for a specific overview over a sub part of a large process. It contained a bit more than a single control. 
I too think the idea to be pretty neat and the implementation in fact quite smart, and there is certainly some use case for this, but that use case is a bit more limited than I thought in the first moment.
Rolf Kalbermatter
