grouping issue

[arupoon8]

Hello,

                I am trying to accomplish something like shown in the picture. I know that I cannot group indicators and controls into single cluster. But can someone give me a workaround so that I can accomplish this.

Even in my UI they need to placed as a group and even in the block diagram it would be better if it acts like a cluster..because if i put the controls as individual control or indicator i would end up with

(5 button controls+ 6 Led indicators+ 1 combo box control) * 96 = 1152 icons in my block diagram. How do i overcome this?

[Pianne]

Couldn't you make all of them controls (disable if necessary) and use a cluster control?

[arupoon8]

Will it work? I mean, can I make the LED's as control and disable it so that the user doesn't click on it and change the color of LED in the disabled state?

[Pianne · Accepted solution]

Sure you can!

[johnsold]

Yes. You can disable some of the controls in the cluster. In this case you want to Disable but NOT Disable and Grayed Out.

Note that you can change the state of the disabled controls in the edit mode.

To write to the controls being used as indicators, use a local variable.  This is one of the few legitimate uses for locals.

Can your user really make sense of 96 copies of that cluster on a panel? That seems like a lot of visual clutter to me. Maybe some way to select the active cluster or a small group for display.  If you take that appoach, then you could group separate indicators and controls. You would not need the disable and local variable. I would probably keep the data in an array or arrays on the block diagram.

Lynn

[JÞB]

I've got to agree with Lynn's assessment.  Its very hard for a user to observe that much data at any one time.  You really need to pick and choose what details to display when you get to very large numbers of "Widgets."

Just to give you a taste of what I mean I'll show a screenshot of how I overcame "User Data Saturation" for a project the was used to monitor a large bank of sensors inside a F-24 Lightning II. (Used to test for EMI Hardness) and yes it was a fun little project

The display on the left provided summary information for all sensors and permitted the user to expand to look at details on a specific sensor (the screen on the right actually loaded into that sub-panel on the main.vi

Color indicated general status (black being out of system) and the caption floating over the clusters provided current Temp, RSSI, Voltage or current at the user's discresion.  Clicking the cell selected which sensor to put in the detail display.  And of course everything got logged to a file.

Block Diagram management was a beast though  things scale up pretty fast!

Spoiler

Thats just a portion of the main BD!  the rest is cleaner!

[arupoon8]

@Jeff- Thanks for the response. I got really good implementation ideas from your answer.

@Johnsold- Thank you. Even though I group the controls and indicators I will still end up with lot of icons in my Block diagram. I am trying to see different ways i can group my controls

@Pianne- Thank you for quick response. Will try to check whether it will work out for my requirement.

[JÞB]

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@arupoon8 wrote:

@Jeff- Thanks for the response. I got really good implementation ideas from your answer.

@johnsold- Thank you. Even though I group the controls and indicators I will still end up with lot of icons in my Block diagram. I am trying to see different ways i can group my controls

@Pianne- Thank you for quick response. Will try to check whether it will work out for my requirement.

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At least you can create the control refs with one fell swoop.  Jack's great idea hadn't been delivered when I developed that solution.

[JackDunaway]

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@JÞB wrote:

Block Diagram management was a beast though  things scale up pretty fast!

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 In this case, you could consider the Controls[] property of a panel, Auto-index the refs in a For Loop, pull the "Label.Text" property off the Ctl Ref, and then group/sort with a regex. A wee bit more scaleable and more debuggable!

[JÞB]

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@JackDunaway wrote:

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@JÞB wrote:

Block Diagram management was a beast though  things scale up pretty fast!

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 In this case, you could consider the Controls[] property of a panel, Auto-index the refs in a For Loop, pull the "Label.Text" property off the Ctl Ref, and then group/sort with a regex. A wee bit more scaleable and more debuggable!

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D'OH!

IT NEVER OCCURED TO ME!  Do you know HOW LONG that chunk of code took me or how many mouse clicks?

Of course "debugging" wasn't an issue.