Show parts of a running panel in an auxiliary panel

[pegli]

Hi,

we have a couple VIs that are running "independently" and that are started by the user himself. This is one VI which does data aquisition on system 1 (and displays it) and another VI that performs the data aquisition on a second experiment. However, for demonstration purposes, I would like to have a third VI which I can show on a secondary monitor that shows one plot from the "aquisition VI 1" and two plots from the "aquisition VI 2". Since this is only for a quick demo, I didn't really want to put the two things into a higher level structure. I thought that I could just use a subpanel to unite the different parts of the running vi panels on a new panel (the panel of the "demo" vi). However, it seems that it is not possible to use subpanels for running vis. Do you have any ideas how I can realize such a "united view" easily where I have hopefully not to change the two aquisition VIs?

For sure, one could make the two VIs subvis of the demo vi and then just pass out the data with "conventional" connectors. Nevertheless, I hope that I could avoid that since I would like to run the two aquisition VIs indementently and only rarely have to use the "demo vi".

Peter

[cbutcher]

Inserting a VI into a subpanel requires that the VI's front panel not be open elsewhere - as such, if you want your two "source" VIs to be separately open (you can still run them separately, you just can't show their panels) then you won't be able to directly use subpanels.

A simple option might be passing a reference into the two VIs to a graph (or pair of graphs) and then using the Value property to update them - you can check if the reference is invalid and then not do anything with it to allow running them normally as they are now. Then use the Call by Asynchronous Reference or similar to run them from within a new Demo VI.

Other (perhaps more responsive) options include using queues or notifiers to pass values out. Again, you can check if they're valid in the "source" VIs. This is largely the same structure.

If you don't want to change them at all, I think you'll struggle - you can again use the Call by Async node to start them, then put them in subpanels, but it will prevent you opening their front panels separately, and you can't choose to only display a specific graph (although you can resize the subpanel and scroll around (perhaps with property node and Position property) to only show the graph, then hide the scroll bars).