Hidden VI Quirk

[Jaegen]

There is an interesting "quirk" (we'll call it that for now ) that shows up if you only have one VI running and it's hidden.  It appears that the "Getting Started" window is re-launched only if there are no VIs open.  However, If you have one VI open but it's hidden, then LabVIEW becomes totally unuseable.  Try closing all other VIs and running the attached VI - it's just a simple VI which first hides itself, then runs a constant while loop.  You should probably save it first (read on ...).  When I do this, I end up with a "LabVIEW" button on my taskbar which doesn't do anything - clicking on it does nothing and it has no context menu.  If I have "hideRootWindow=True" in my "LabVIEW.ini" file, I don't even get this (i.e. LabVIEW just disappears altogether).  The only way to solve the problem (without just killing LabVIEW in the Task Manager) is to find the running VI in Windows Explorer and open it from there - this will force the front panel to "unhide" itself.

I see this behaviour in both 7.1.1 and 8.2.

Perhaps the code which determines when to re-launch the "Getting Started" window should be modified to launch it if there are no visible VIs?  Or even better, have a dialog box pop up listing all the hidden VIs which are running when this happens.  I guess I could create my own VI to do this, but I would have to launch it from explorer myself whenever this situation arises.

Any other ideas?

Jaegen

[TCPlomp]

I thought about making the VI 'System' but I couldn't get that to work. so....

Ton

[Jaegen]

What exactly do you mean by "system"???

[TCPlomp]

There are rumours on the net, VI's have more properties than standard accessible, this is supposed te be one of them (so I've heard)

Ton

Message Edited by TonP on 09-28-2006 08:31 PM

[Jaegen]

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@TonP wrote:
There are rumours on the net, VI's have more properties than standard accessible, this is supposed te be one of them (so I've heard)

Ton

Message Edited by TonP on 09-28-2006 08:31 PM

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Ahh, of course .... "rumours on the net" - how subtle

Jaegen

[JeffBoettcher]

This one I'm not sure if I'm going to call a bug.  However I think you can achieve the behavior you might want by doing the following:

Instead of setting your own window state to hidden, first open and hold on to a reference to yourself.  Then use the FP.Close method on yourself.  I think this will do what you want.

Good luck!

[Jaegen]

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@Jeff B wrote:

This one I'm not sure if I'm going to call a bug.  However I think you can achieve the behavior you might want by doing the following:

Instead of setting your own window state to hidden, first open and hold on to a reference to yourself.  Then use the FP.Close method on yourself.  I think this will do what you want.

Good luck!

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No, I wouldn't call it a bug either (that's why it's a "quirk" )

Sorry, I just now checked the online help (should have done this before) and found this on the "Front Panel:Open Method" page:

Hidden—Opens the front panel window as floating but not visible. If you set the input to this value and close all references to the front panel, the window remains open but hidden. Because the VI is open, the Getting Started window does not appear. To solve this problem, open the VI from the operating system. For example, double-click the VI in Windows Explorer to open the VI.

I realize now that this is an "enough power to shoot yourself in the foot" issue.  This is definitely a necessary "feature", not at all a bug (sorry for even calling it a quirk )- it gives us the power to hide all the windows and keep a VI (or VIs) running in development mode.  If the "Getting Started" window did automatically pop up in this case, we couldn't do this.

Thanks for the useful workaround - it now all makes complete sense.

Jaegen

EDIT:  Oops - how do I display a colon followed by an "O" without it turning into a smiley???

Message Edited by Jaegen on 09-29-2006 01:20 PM