Customizing the insertion palette in a custom UI

[Mike Webster]

Greetings,

I'm working on a custom user interface for a Teststand application and I want to give the user the ability to edit sequence files using a simplified subset of the predefined step types.  I'm basing the custom UI off of the Labview FullOI example in the teststand 4.2 folder.

I've found the 'Customize' context menu item off of the insertion palette and that seems to get the majority of what I'm looking for (hiding folders like IVI and Synchronization and individual steps like FTP Files and Call Executable), but what I really want to know is if I can remove the various 'top' icons that select between adapters.  I'd like the customer to only see Labview and None and get rid of or hide CVI, C/C++ DLL, .NET, and ActiveX.

Where, by the way, are the options that you set in the Customize menu stored at for the custom user interface versus the full-blown sequence editor?  I want to make sure I have a good list of all of my modified files so I can create a working deployment CD later on down the road.  I'm assuming that changing the visible categories in the custom UI will not change their visibility in the sequence editor application.

[Mike Webster]

Addendum

I thought, from experimentation, that the FullOI insertion palette and the sequence editor insertion palette were separate.  But after shutting down seqedit and relaunching it, it's reloaded the customizations that I made in the FullOI interface.  So that leads to the question of whether or not I can remove or display items in the insertion palette programatically instead of having them saved to whatever INI file is backing this in both places (stationoptions.ini maybe?)

[dug9000 · Accepted solution]

The step insert palette customization changes affect both the sequence editor and UI. The settings are stored in testexec.ini in the cfg directory.

You can hide adapters by using the adapter configuration dialog in the config menu

You might want to just keep separate versions of your testexec.ini, one for when you want the customizations and one for when you don't, assuming you aren't using the same machine for both. If you are using the same machine for both you might want to setup some sort of automated way of switching out which version of the file you are using.

Hope this helps,

-Doug

Message Edited by dug9000 on 07-07-2009 10:16 AM

[Mike Webster]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for.  I'll probably add in some sort of backup/restore INI file functionality into my custom UI so that the regular sequence editor still has all of the tools readily available.