How do I prevent controls from moving?

[Dave Minerath]

On my front panel display, controls and indicators are getting distorted from one session of LabVIEW to the next.

For example:  a meter with three needles has the needles sitting at the top edge of the gage (nearly off the gage completely), and the scale significantly smaller than the overall size of the gage positioned in the middle of the gage.

Other controls have shifted position on the control panel, with the trend to be shifts to the left or upwards.  Attached is a screen capture of the distorted front panel.

Aside from the gage issue (which has been growing steadily worse over the last week or two, since the start of the software project) the jump in the other controls and indicators was rather sudden.  One day I save the project and everything is in the correct position, and the next morning the controls and
indicators are shifted.
I'm moving everything back into place and re-creating the meters, and making sure that window scaling/resizing options are turned off.

Has anybody seen this before?  I want to be able to scale the front panel with the windo size, but not if it's going to cause controls and indicators to morph into something unusable.

[scomack]

Hi, Dave.
   You might get abetter response in the LabView forum.  You mistakenly posted into the LabWindows forum.

Message Edited by scomack on 06-21-2007 10:28 AM

[Caseyw]

Hi Dave,

This is definitely an interesting issue; I have never encountered "moving" controls on a front panel before. I would suggest that once you have all of your front panel items displayed correctly (how you would like them), you click on Edit >> Make Current Values Default. This default display should show each time you open your VI.

If the problem persists (moving front panel objects), it may be useful if you could post a small VI to your next response that showcases the issue. This way, I can test out your code on my machine and see if the issue appears to occur only on your computer, or if it seems to be an issue with the overall VI. What version of LabVIEW are you using?

You mentioned scaling the front panel with window size; do you currently have this option enabled?

Have a great day Dave!

Regards,

Casey Weltzin

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[Dave Minerath]

Opps, I thought I was in the LabVIEW forum...this was my first post and I must have selected the wrong area, my apologies.

Is there a way to move the thread to the LabVIEW forum?

I've contacted a NI support engineer and sent a copy of the vi with the original sets of controls and indicators (attached here).  I haven't been able to duplicate the problem yet.  I had the scaling and window proportion options selected, and have turned them off for now; I'll need them back on eventually when I move from my development machine to the embedded system.

Pay attention in particular to the meters--in the original picture posted, the needles were nearly off the meter face entirely and I could not fix that, no matter how I resized the meter.  It had to be deleted and replaced to fix it.  The other controls were just moved back to their original positions.

I'm using LabVIEW 8.2 Pro Development System on a Dell Precision 340 (2.4 GHz, 512 mb RAM, nVidia Quadro2 EX video adapter) with Windows XP SP2 and all updates to date.

Dave

Message Edited by Dave Minerath on 06-22-2007 08:40 AM

[Caseyw]

Hi Dave,

Since you've contacted another Applications Engineer regarding this issue (presumably via phone), I will let that engineer handle the problem that you are seeing so that we're not duplicating efforts on this end. Please let me know if I can help you with any additional questions; I would be glad to assist in any way possible.

Have a great day Dave!

Regards,

Casey Weltzin

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[detlefhof]

Hi Dave,
I have the same problem since long. I was surprised that I never found somebody in this community experiencing the same trouble before. When I asked a support engineer in Germany some time ago he told me that this problem is not known and had no idea what to do against.
From time to time I have to rearrange all controls on my main VI, including their appearance, because positions and sizes have changed, and that without having worked on this vi but merely on some sub-VIs.

I use the newest LV version (8.2) and Windows XP.

I would be happy to know how I could avoid this boring job.

Regards Detlef

[Yi Y]

Hi Detlef,
I tried out Dave's VI, and it seems like the disortion problem does occur.  It occurs more often when I resize the window so it's very small and everything starts colliding.  I will report this bug to R&D and have them take a look at it.  Unfortunately there's no work around for this problem right now.  You can disable Maintain proportions of window for different monitor resolutions and scale all objects on front pan\el as the window resizes.  Also, just make sure that when the window resizes, the objects don't collide.
Hope this information helps.

Yi Y.
Applications Engineer
http://www.ni.com/support

[Dave Minerath]

Good, it means I'm not crazy 🙂

Sorry if I haven't been reading this terribly often, as I was diverted to another area of the project for a while.

I'll turn off the scaling and proportion options for the time being.

Thanks again for checking it out,
Dave

[detlefhof]

OK, thanks for your efforts.
Detlef