Any way to show a subvi's frontpanel within its parent with out the cumbersome "subpanel"?

Question

I'm writing an application, where several loops are running in parallel (e. g. read sensor data, receive UDP packets, send UDP packets, wait for input). Except for some configuration data, the loops are completely independent from each other (occasional communication is done via queues). Each of the loops will run indefinitely until told to stop by commands to a queue and is in its own subVI (otherwise the main blockdiagramm just containing the overall state machine would start to grow outside the screen, which is even worse than having to scroll in a text based language). Each of the subVIs also shows some information (status, sensor data, graphs, debugging).
So the big question is: how can I show all these subVIs information in a single window?
Using the "subpanel"-container is pretty much out of question. It adds almost as much clutter to the blockdiagram than the loops would do themselves (with "create vi reference", "insert vi", "run vi", "remove vi"; and that for every parallel subVI) and makes the code harder to maintain. Even worse, Labview is no longer able to tell me if one of the subVIs is currently broken (e. g. because there was a change in a typedef that requires changes in a subVI) until I run the complete program (or open each of the subVIs individually). Getting parameters into and out of the VIs isn't easy either that way (no more simple terminals).
I thought about making the subVIs' appearance titlebar-/menu-/borderless and floating and hardcoding a pixel position for all of them. But I can't really control what resolution the PCs running this program will have. So I fear they will be all over the place with no possibility for the user to move them around. This would also mean the main windows would always have to stick to the top left, which in itself would annoy users.
I remember having this problem already. My solution at this time was to make a copy of every frontpanelobject of the subVIs on the main VI (thereby cluttering the blockdiagram with heaps of unconnected terminals), creating a reference to that object, bundling them all together and writing it in a global variable. Then every subVI would pick out the references it needed and change the value with the value property node. Globals and changing the value per reference both being pretty bad Labview practice, it was still more manageable than dynamic calls to subVIs (which the subpanels comes to, although it shouldn't be needed). What making this approach not very practical this time, is, that some of the subVIs (and what they show) may be developed by other developers. This would mean for every frontpanel object they add/change/remove a reference needs to be added/changed/removed. While the reference list will be it's own cluster typedef, still all other subVIs will have to be updated, too.
Maybe I missed something. But is there really no simple option like "show frontpanel when loaded at this position within parent frontpanel"? Would make things soo much easier and way easier to maintain.

Answer 1

mikeporter wrote:
I'm sorry I'm not aware of any "cumbersome" subpanels - unless of course you don't know what you're doing. There is this wonderful invention called a "subVI" that can be used to organize and simplify your code, or are they too "cumbersome" as well? You should really learn a bit about what you are pontificating over before you start running off at the mouth.
Mike...
I didn't want to step on your toes. No need to get personal.
Subpanels make some additional code necessary that hasn't got to do anything with the actual program. And I AM using subIVs as I wrote in my first post, which is exactly the root of the problem.
Nevertheless I now solved it in a way that comes close to what I wanted. I don't know if some of you meant your suggestions to be understood that way (at least I didn't ). The subVIs will now "insert" themselves (via invoke node) into a subpanel on the main vi, which they are given a reference of at call. This adds minimal aditional code, especially on the main VI which I want to keep as clean as possible. By clustering the panel reference into the parameters the subVIs are already given (not used in the example I attached below), there isn't even a change on the terminals of the subVIs.
I got to check now if this works well with event structures within the subVIs or if it can create the same problems like multiple event structures within a single VI.
So no global variables anymore and no writing values by property node. I don't know if this just wasn't possible in previous Labview versions I had a try at that (I guess it was 8.6 and/or 2009) or I just didn't come up with the idea back then.
And if the text wasn't that helpful, here are two screens:
Parent VI:
SubVI:
Attachments:
main.png ‏2 KB
subvi.png ‏5 KB