Hidden Controls

[jspaarg]

Is there a global way to show all hidden controls?

The only way that I have found is to right-click the block diagram control and click "Show Control".

Problem is, how do you know which controls are hidden?

Any help is appreciated.

[tbob]

The method you described is the only way that I know of to show hidden controls.  The only way to find hidden controls is to do this on every control in the block diagram one at a time.  Yes it is a pain.

[Darren]

It would indeed be cool to have a menu option in LabVIEW to show all hidden controls on a panel.  Who knows, maybe we'll see this feature in a future version of LabVIEW... 😉

-D

[michenglaoxu]

It makes the code really unreadable.  NI should do sth for Hide control in its next LV version.

[jspaarg]

I am used to a number of global development environment concepts that would benefit LabView.

I have been writing software for a lot of years, but have only been doing LabView for about six months.

Among my biggest complaints has been lack of project based development, which was apparenetly added in 8.0.

I am using 7.1 and chance of upgrading is slim. 

Is there a place on the forums or elsewhere where NI solicits input for feature enhancements?

[Darren]

Yes, you can submit suggestions here:

http://digital.ni.com/applications/psc.nsf/default?OpenForm

Thanks for your interest in making LabVIEW a better product,
-D

[Ben]

Attached is a simple VI that will iteratively search for controls and when one is found, set its visable property true. Change the "This VI" constant to a path control if you want to use this VI on other VI's.

Most of its opeartion is self explanatory except the "to more specific" function that is used in a manner I first saw demonstrated by Jean-Pierrre Drolet. If LV is succesful in converting the control reference into a tab control reference, it assumed to be one. In that specail case, we gather a new set of control references and add them to the pile.

the process continues until we can not find any more controls to make visable.

Can I ask you a question please? You said "Among my biggest complaints has been lack of project based development, ...".

If you miss it then you know what to do with it. I have not quite figured out what I do with it now that I have it!

So what should I be able to do now that I have LV 8 and project management?

Curious,

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 02-07-2006 06:27 PM

[Darren]

...to make a slight addition to Ben's example, don't forget to recurse through Clusters and Arrays (the other control types that can contain other controls) in addition to Tab Controls.  And in case you're wondering, yes, you can make the element inside an array invisible... 😉

...and in case you're still wondering, RadioButtonsControl inherits from Cluster, so you don't have to parse those separately from Clusters.

...and in case you've stopped wondering, I'm thinking about officially adding a panel parsing VI to vi.lib somewhere in a future LabVIEW release so you guys can stop writing your own...if you own the VI Analyzer, you've already got one:  vi.lib\addons\analyzer\_analyzerutils.llb\VIAnUtil Get All FP References.vi.

-D

[Ben]

"

 I'm thinking about officially adding a panel parsing VI to vi.lib somewhere in a future LabVIEW release so you guys can stop writing your own...if you own the VI Analyzer, you've already got one:  vi.lib\addons\analyzer\_analyzerutils.llb\VIAnUtil Get All FP References.vi.

"

(You appear to use the color scheme that I do for my boring VI's.)

Oh yes please do!

Aside from the method I used in my example I have only seen scripting methods used to ID control types. Do you have any recomendations on better ways of identifying what type of control a reference is associated with?

Ben

[Darren]

I made this suggestion in another thread recently...you can wire a control reference into vi.lib\utility\GetType.llb\Get Type of Control.vi, and it returns an enum describing the datatype of the control.  As for identifying controls based on their class, you can use the Class Name property of the Control class.

-D