Show hidden front panel controls/indicators

[JE]

I have a problem when I print the front panel. Much more space is printed that actually occupied by my front panel items. I assume that I have some hidden controls/indicators that seem to determine the print window. Would you think my assumption is correct? And if yes, is there an easy way to find out if I have some hidden items laying around. I have a lot of treminals in the diagram and it would take a lot of time to check if one of them has a hidden control/indicator associated with it.

Thanks,

Jerome.

[tst]

Get a property node for the VI (right click and selct Class>>VI server>>VI).
Use the Panel property to get a reference to the FP and wire that into another property node and select Controls[]. You'll have an array of references to the controls on the front panel. Wire that array through a for loop and use a property node to turn them all to visible.

[AlejandroZ]

Hello.

You could use the attached VI to make all front panel objects visible or invisible, and see if anything far away pops up.

If your front panel contains tab controls and stuff like that, the attached VI may not work on every single control, but I think it should serve your purpose.

Good luck.

Alejandro

[JE]

Thank you AlejandroZ and tst for both of your replies. Unfortunately, I didn't have any luck in wiring up the property node and also I wasn't able to look at your sample code, AlejandroZ, because I am using LabVIEW 6.1.

So, I ended up going through all the terminals to see if there were any hidden front panel controls/indicators and there were not. Can you think of any reasons why it is printing more area than necessary?

Thank you very much for your help so far.

Jerome.

[Donald]

Hi Jerome,

“Can you think of any reasons why it is printing more area than necessary?”

I’m using LV6.1 and I’ve had the same problem since 2001 for a VI with a tab control. Narrowed the cause of the problem down to the tab control by deleting things from the front panel and doing frequent Print Previews. I’ve never come across mention of it as a bug, but maybe it is/was one. I’ve also done a lot of other VI’s with tab controls that haven’t had this problem.

I found that I could get rid of the print area problem if I toggled the visibility of the tab control’s Label and Caption both to ON and then OFF again ... or by changing the size of the tab control a bit; however, the problem frequently reappeared when I did required edits over the past few years.

I got tired of the whole thing and found a fix that works for me:
To let the user print the front panel, I had been using the application item “Print Window ...” in the VI’s Run-Time menu. I dropped that and switched to invoking the ‘Print Panel to Printer’ method with the ‘Entire Panel?’ option set to false ... no more printouts with the front panel scrunched in the corner.