Text blinks on all pages of a Tab Control

[Beth F]

I realize that there were posts about this problem a few years ago and they were fixed after 6.0, but I'm still having a similar problem with 7.1 on XP.
The blinking controls on one page of a tab control do not show through to the other pages (as of the fix in 6.1 and on), except when you are using a boolean button such as OK or Cancel.  Using a boolean button with text, I see the text blink through to other pages alternating between the button text color and the blink foreground color.
There is a workaround by using the active page property to only allow the control to blink when the page is active, but this is rather inconvenient for my application.  Am I missing something that would solve this problem, or is it just a leftover bug?

On side note, this "problem" is kinda cool to use for my Acknowledge Alarms button if I put an identical button on each tab at the exact same location because it makes it look like just the text is blinking   Unfortunately, this is not so cool for other buttons.

Also, as I played around with changing the foreground blink color to Transparent, I observered some more odd behavior.  Run the attached VI after going to Tools>>Options>>Colors and changing your foreground blink color to T for transparent.  If you change to page 2 when the OK button is not blinking (grey like normal), the OK text blinks through; but it you change to page 2 while the button is in the middle of blinking (just has a frame around it, no 3-D color), the OK magically disappears!  This doesn't really bother me, but it is interesting. 

That's a lot of info, but I guess my only question is if I am doing something wrong to make the text blink through or if we just have to live with it for now.

Thanks,

Beth

[CasonSwRI]

How do you get your tab pane to look like brushed aluminum? 

[Beth F]

Hmmm, honestly I didn't really pay attention to the color, I just copied a VI that was the official NI fix to this problem in 6.0.    I guess it was made in a previous version and is not available now.  I can't seem to make a new one like that in 7.1.  All I can suggest is using the tools palette to change the color.

Anyway, same issue no matter what the backgound color of the tab

[rolfk]

This is a bug and not a surprising one. Blinking has always been a hack added to LabVIEW for BridgeVIEW and probably never fully integrated into the normal object model of LabVIEW objects. As such it has frequently broken with new objects such as the Tab Control. You may want to report it to NI and hope they get to fix it in LabVIEW 8.0.

I'm not sure what you guys mean by brushed aluminium. This simply is a dialog style control which can't be colored by the developer but will attempt to take on whatever are the default colors set in your OS for Windows backgrounds. Checkout the dialog Controls palette.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Beth F]

Thanks, that's what I was beginning to suspect.  It's not a showstopper, just thought I'd check around if anyone else was having this problem. 

How do you report a possible bug to NI?  Just do a normal email support request?

[TylerS]

Beth,

I will go ahead and report this bug to R&D. To answer your question, though, the best way to go about reporting a bug to NI is to create a service request and call or email in. This can be done by going to the "Contact NI" section of our website. We're always grateful to people like you for taking the time to help us improve our products! Have a great day!

Tyler S

Applications Engineer

National Instruments