Is there a way to change a tab control from a system style to another style without lasing all the controls and connections?

[magicbean]

I have a system-style tab control with a lot of pages and controls. My client now probably wants a dark mode where the tab colour can be changed to dark grey, but I can't do that with a system tab.

If I replace it with any other style of tab, it loses all the controls and indicators.

The tab control is typedefed, but replacing the tab type in the typedef doesn't help either.

The only way I can think of doing this is to drag all the controls out of every page into blank areas of the front panel, replacing the tab control, and then dragging all the controls and indicators back. That's a really big task.

Is there a better way to do this?

(LabVIEW 2022)

[UliB · Accepted solution]

What happens if you change your Type Def. to a Strict Type Def after replacing the system tab with e.g. a modern tab?

[magicbean]

So far I end up being led a merry dance that seems to involve crashing LabVIEW a lot. But - changing the Type Def to a Strict Typedef and replacing the tab to an NXG tyle does keep all the controls!

I then had a subsequent problem: I have a subVI that allows me to change the tab page visibility by name. The front panel control is an Object refnum which I typecast to the Type Defed tab type by including a tab of the apropriate type on the fron panel and creating a reference to it. LabVIEW generated an error 1035 with the message 

It turns out that the solution was to do the following:

1. Open the original system tab Type Def

2. Change to an NXG tab, change the Type Def to Strict Type Def and save. This successfully replaces the control in my top-level VI and keeps all controls and indicators.

3. Re-open the tab Strict Type Def and change it from Strict Type Def back to Type Def

Thank you Ulib

[UliB]

A Type Def. keeps the data type in sync. A Strict Type Def. also keeps the visual aspect in sync.

So your way from Type Def. to Strict Type Def. to Type Def. seems logical when you want to change the visibility of tab pages.

Lately there were some bugs discovered, which crash LabVIEW when replacing tab controls. 

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Crash-when-replacing-a-TabControl-with-quot-Replace-No/m-p/4428123 

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Crash-when-undoing-a-TabControl-replace/m-p/4426977