Adding annotations programatically

[Sof]

ActiveX control graph.

If I add 1000 annotations programatically it takes about 60 secs.  If I add a 1000 from the designer the program comes right up.

What is the deal here?

It is interesting to note that the time it takes to add them programatically seems to be exponential.  For 200, it's pretty quick.  For 600 much, much slower. etc...

We never know how many annos the user wants to use. 

[AndrewMc]

It is reasonable that there would be some time difference between adding 1000 annotations programmatically versus at design time.  While I saw the behavior you mentioned using Measurement Studio 8.0 controls, it looks to be improved in the latest release of Measurement Studio 8.1.1.  If you are using 8.1.1, please let me know.  If you are using 8.1 or earlier, please upgrade to 8.1.1 as this should improve the speed.  It took about 20 seconds for us in 8.1.1.

Message Edited by AndrewMc on 08-20-2007 10:06 PM

[Sof]

I am using 8.1.1.

Why is it "reasonable" that it would take longer programatically?

Why would it take you 20 secs to add 1000 annotations and then an additional, probably, > 60 secs, to add another 1000?

It seems to grow with the list size.  Are you sorting or something every time one gets added to the list?

Is the answer to sit there in the designer and punch in 2000 or more annotations from the designer or add as many as you can until your finger cramps?  Sure seems kludgy.

[AndrewMc]

Hey Sof,

I'm still not sure of the application of 1000+ annotations.  It doesn't seem like you would ever have that many annotations.

In any case, I have reported this to R&D (CAR: 4CN6KJBU) for further investigation.

[Sof]

The application is, we need an annotation to represent every point.  NI offers different point styles but unfortunately we must have point styles that our customers have used in the past.  Therefore, we must use custom annotations (using images) for every point on the plot.  In this case our plots only have 50 points or so and the user would like to bring up maybe as many as 20 plots.  Seems cluttered right?  Well the user can view one at a time or more, actually the spec states as many as 40.  Plus we have annotations for cursors and we have a "FrontPlot" (to place the selected curve in front of the others).  All in all we need alot of annotations to present the graph to the users according to spec.

And we must use the ActiveX graph because of performance.  The same graph is used for another plot we call Narrowband data which can have as many as 262,000 points.  For this it's doesn't make sense to have annotations for each point.

Thanks for submitting our issue to R&D.  If you have another way to solve this problem by all means let us know.

Respectfully,
Scott