Resizing multiple front panel objects

Is there any way I can select a handful of front panel objects (in this case decorative lines) and size them together to make sure they're all the same length?

LabView 7 has a re-size button on the toolbar. Select all the objects you want to resize (either by drawing a rectangle around all the objects, or by shift-clicking on them one at a time), then click on the resize button and select one of the options.
In LabView 6, you'll need to initially get the objects to the same size manually or by copying them. But then, in LabView 6 or 7, if you group a collection of objects, they resize together. Get them to the same size initially, then group them. They'll resize together after that. The LabView User Manual, in a section titled Grouping and Locking Objects states "Grouped objects maintain their relative arrangement and size when you use the Positioning tool to move and resize them."
To group a collection of objects,
select all the objects, then click on the Reorder button on the toolbar and select Group.

Similar Messages

Front Panel objects do not stay in place after saving, closing, and reopening the VI.

I have been working with a couple of versions of a main VI. The original VI was given to me so that I could add additional functionalities to it. I had been designing the front panel of the latest version of the VI on a Dell laptop running Windows 7 and LabView 2011 SP1 using a monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080. My booleans, numerics, and plots on the front panel had always stayed in place after saving, closing, and reopening the VI. Once in the field, I connected my laptop to a cRIO9073 and used my laptop screen with a resolution of 1366x768 to operate the VI. I made some changes to the VI, saved it, and reopened it. This time I noticed that the front panel objects had become overlapped, resized, and generally rearranged. I tried fixing the objects but I noticed that they reverted back to the incorrect positions after saving and reopening the VI. I was successful in keeping the objects in position a couple of times, but when I would open the VI at a later time, the objects were again rearranged. This is happening on both my monitor and laptop screen. The original version of the VI, however, does not behave this way and I have opened it on both my monitor and laptop screen. In this version, the front panel objects always stay in place. Both VI's have the same window size properties. Could I have corrupted the latest version of my VI somehow? Below are screenshots of the front panels of both VI's.
Attachments:
Blender Controller Original.PNG ‏140 KB
Blender Controller.PNG ‏203 KB

Hi Miguel,
It is possible to programmatically set or change the position of front panel objects. (for example: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/4D0DA06B43195B3F862572F3000AF2D3?OpenDocument) However, if you haven’t intentionally done that, it seems unlikely that it is the problem.
Have you tried copying the entire block diagram in to a new VI to see if the problem persists? While it is unlikely, you are right that it is possible for VIs to become corrupted. I’ve never heard of a situation like this except in the situation where the settings Tom had you check have been changed. Here is some information about those settings:
http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/7567EF257B9CFDF986256F630073228F?OpenDocument
Since there was no rearrangement when you copied the front panel to a new VI, you might try copying the block diagram a little bit at a time to see if there is some particular part of it that creates the problem somehow.
K. Johnson

Programmtically Scaling the front panel objects depending on the Dispaly card resolution.

I have programmed my application in dispaly resolution of 1024 by 768. I want to deploy the same code on a machine having a resolution of 800 by 600. how do i scale down my front panel objects to 800 by 600 resolution .
I want to do it programmatically.
Suresh Thangappan

To get best control, you will need to do it programmatically. Using the property nodes, all controls can be moved and resized. Resizing is problematic, however, because there is no single method that works for all controls. The top level Bounds property is read-only. It should be used to make sure whatever you did to change the size resulted in the size you expected. You will need to search the control–specific properties for the one which resizes your control of interest. For example, the Plot Area.Size property changes the size of a Waveform Graph.
You can link one control to the size of the panel and have it scale automatically. Do this by selecting the object, then selecting Edit>>Scale Object with Panel. I typically use this for the main object on my panel. The rest of the objects are then moved around the rescaled object, but not rescaled. You will have to rescale them yourself, and move them again if you do not like the position. You will probably want/need to change font sizes on numerics.
What you are trying to do is possible, but it is also tedious. Good luck! Let us know if you still have problems.
This account is no longer active. Contact ShadesOfGray for current posts and information.

How to resize the front panel to fit different resolutions

I m using LabVIEW 8.2 on Windows XP SP2
I've tried both “maintain proportions of window for different monitor resolutions” and “scale all objects on front panel as the window resizes” selected but just messed up everything when i switched to another different resolution. It's annoying since I'm using 22 inch monitor to do the coding but the user supposed to run it on laptop or wince.
Any solutions to it?
Thx in advance.

Thank you all. Following is the reply from NI support. I think the best way is to edit vi in low resolution.
One of the easiest ways to tackle varying screen resolutions is to design
the front panel to the lowest resolution that you expect it to run on. It
should then look acceptable on any screen larger than that.
However, you can get a bit more tricky by programmatically determining the
computer's screen resolution and then dynamically changing the size of your
front panel objects. Use an Application Property Node and select
Display>>All Monitors to return the current screen size. Then, according to
the screen size, you can size the control or indicator programmatically
using the Size property node for your front panel objects.
Ultimately, these issues have often been a result of font size issues.
Specifically, this can be a problem when two machines have different
desktop theme/font settings. If your objects are coming out in different
sizes on different computers, you can setup up LabVIEW to use the same font
on different systems by modifying the .INI file.
The easiest way is to do this: use Tools->Options->Fonts from the LabVIEW
GUI. You can then set the system fonts to anything you want. After you
have done this on one machine, open your INI file (it is in the same
directory as the LabVIEW executable) with any text editor and copy the
corresponding entries to another file. Add these entries to the INI files
on any machines you want to lock to font. You will probably run into
issues if you are supporting different platforms (Windows and Mac or Mac
and Linux, for example), since the fonts you want may not be available on
both platforms. There are Windows fonts available for both Mac and Linux
platforms, so this can be somewhat ameliorated.
This is all I can think of, but that's not to say these are the only
solutions. You might check the Discussion Forums, as many of our LabVIEW
Champions have tackled similar issues and offer their expertise as well.
Here's just a few threads that I'd like to refer you to:
How to make the size of VI and controls unchanged irrespective of the
resolution?
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=273613&requireLogin=False
How to program the front panel size to fit different monitor resolution?
http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=87160&requireLogin=False
I hope this discussion helps you along the way in your application
development. Please let me know if you have any further questions/comments
and I would be happy to discuss them with you.
Otherwise, it was a pleasure assisting you and thank you for choosing
National Instruments.

Closing references to front panel objects

Short version of my question: are programmatically generated references to front panel objects (controls, etc.) automatically disposed of when the VI exits?
More details: I'm recursively retrieving references to all the controls on the front panel. (I say recursively because I'm also getting the individual controls from clusters, subclusters, and so on.) I then return an array of control references, which does not include the references to clusters--only standalone controls or the actual controls themselves contained in clusters.
Do I need to explicitly close the references to clusters that this VI generates, or is it unnecessary since the VI will run briefly, return an array, and then exit?
Or another scenario: in a subVI I open a reference to the parent VI. Do I need to close that reference at the end of the subVI, or is it pointless because the reference will be disposed of when the subVI exits anyway?
(I did find this article, which I think addresses my question, but I'm not sure.)
Thanks,
peppergrower

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&thread.id=159571&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
Jean-Marc
Jean-Marc
LV2009 and LV2013
Free PDF Report with iTextSharp

Front panel objects missing

I have a weird phenomena. I have a program that runs fine, does data acquisition and writes to measurement fine. All of a sudden, and in no scheduled way, all the front panel text disappears, which causes the write to measurement to fault because there is no text left to build the filepath. But the funny thing is, after pressing stop on the Labview error, the machine keeps running. There is a digital watchdog in the program that is supposed to stop the machine if the program stops. Anyone had this problem, with the front panel objects/text disappearing?

Hi tavwtby,
It sounds like you are running out of virtual memory. Here is a help article on how to extend the size of VM on your system (http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361H-01/lvhowto/enable_lrg_ad_aware/). Try this out and see if you still get the same behavior.
Aldo A
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

Bug: Front Panel objects relative position change when placing merge VI onto Block Diagram

I've posted a bug report on LAVA, here:
http://forums.lavag.org/Front-Panel-objects-relative-position-change-when-placing-merge-VI-onto-Bloc...
If someone at NI can reproduce, can I please get a CAR #?
Thanks,
-Jim
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Donovan B wrote:
Hi Jim,
After my previous post, I also saw this behavior, so I decided to do another test. If there are no decorations in the VI set to “Merge VI” (“Place VI Contents” for LabVIEW 8.5 and later) the controls and indicators are still not selected when dropping the VI from the Functions palette. I checked this behavior back to LabVIEW 7.1 and it is consistent throughout that controls and indicators are not selected. (Consequently, so is the fact that when decorations are present they don’t maintain the relative position).
I am not sure if this would be better suited as a CAR or product suggestion since it has been this way that long, but it does not appear to be related to the fact that decorations are present in the Merge VI. It does seem strange that the decorations are selected though. Looks like the best way to work around this is to drop the VI from the Controls palette. Hopefully, it’s not too much of a hassle.
Hi Donovan,
Thanks for checking in.
> I checked this behavior back to LabVIEW 7.1 and it
is consistent throughout that controls and indicators are not
selected. (Consequently, so is the fact that when decorations are
present they don’t maintain the relative position).
This just means that not many people use this feature. However, now that VIPM Professional makes it so easy to edit the palettes, I'm sure that others will start complaining that this doesn't work as they expect.
> I am not sure if this would be better suited as a CAR or product suggestion
since it has been this way that long, but it does not appear to be
related to the fact that decorations are present in the Merge VI.
Just look up the functional specifications for this feature and see if all objects are supposed to be selected.
But seriously, is there a reason that only the FP decorations are selected? Surely this would be documented somewhere, if there was a good reason for this current (IMO, buggy) behavior.
> It
does seem strange that the decorations are selected though. Looks like
the best way to work around this is to drop the VI from the Controls
palette. Hopefully, it’s not too much of a hassle.
That's not a reasonably work-around, IMO. It doesn't make sense to drop Block Diagram components onto the Front Panel. For example, this bug affects the JKI State Machine. It doesn't make sense to drop a State Machine onto the Front Panel.
So, I'd file it as a CAR/bug, and then wait to see how LV R&D feels about it. If they can find some valid reason for why Controls and Indicators shouldn't be selected, then that's fine (and hopefully someone will explain it to me).
Thanks,
-Jim

How to hide front panel objects behind other front panel objects

Hi,
I need tho change an existing project and to make it simple just want to hide some front panel objects behind others. But I can't find how to put the one I wnt to the front hiding all others. So now there are some in front that should be hidden.
Is there a button or menu item "Move to front / back" like in many other programs?
Thanks
Martin
Solved!
Go to Solution.

Hi Martin,
what about the link I provided in my previous post? What else do you need?
What about the chapter "fundamentals" in the LabVIEW help?
Going the way "Fundamentals -> Building the FrontPanel -> How-To -> Reordering Objects" seems rather logically to me…
Best regards,
GerdW
CLAD, using 2009SP1 + LV2011SP1 + LV2014SP1 on WinXP+Win7+cRIO
Kudos are welcome

Copy paste a front panel object to the very same xy location

Hello,
Just a practical question, but I would need this kind of feature very often:
How can I copy-paste a front panel object to the very same location? Lets consider I have a TAB container, and on the first page, I have a Graph. I would like to make a same graph on the second page of the TAB, but at the very same XY location compared to the TAB container.
Thanks very much!
Solved!
Go to Solution.

hm, I have just realized, there is an option to "duplicate page" for the TAB containers And it does the magic for me, creates the exact copies of all the objects

Setting up position of front panel objects using input from file

I am working on a project and i have got the following query.
i have a front panel with lot of objects like knobs,dials,push buttons etc..
the entire panel will be the console to the user and as he changes the various
positions of the objects their values will be written in to a file.
now after a days work when the system is restarted again the next day
the values of various objects should be read from the file and the front panel objects should be set in their position according to it
in short the objects(knobs,buttons etc) should both act as o/p i.e when user interacts with them and they should also act as i/p when their position will be set from
file.
how can i achieve this.any help regard
ing this would be greatly appreciated

You should separate the read portion of this vi from the write portion of the vi. You want to execute the read portion of the vi only at startup and the write portion of the vi only at shutdown. So you'll be reading the file and writing the output to the property nodes, running your program, and then taking the value of the controls and writing to file. I have attached an example of how this might work. You might also do this with a state machine structure to control the data flow.
Hope that helps
Attachments:
query.vi ‏49 KB
read_file.vi ‏42 KB
write_file.vi ‏36 KB

Using config files to setup front panel objects and DAQ info.

I am trying to write a program that condenses 5 versions into one. I need to be able to load a configuration file based on the users choice of which machine they are using and use that information for my dropdown boxes and for what was constants in a case structure based on a choice from the droplist.
For example, if a certain part was selected, it had 5 limits listed as constant that the data aquired was compared to. The limits were inside a case structure wired to the droplist.

"I have a case structure that is connected to a digital line. The program receives a value from the machine's PLC and it picks the appropriate case. Inside this case, there are constants for tolerances for the measurement that was selected. Each case has the same number of constants to control the tolerances for 5 different characteristics of the measurement. There are 32 cases each with different values. The problem is, I have 5 different versions of the program with up to 32 cases in each structure, (over 150 different sets of tolerances). I do not have them all in one program as the same case number is used somewhere else and may have different values. The display information on screen is also different from one machine to the other, and I want to
be able to hide or show certain front panel objects. I would like to set up an .ini file of some sort that stores all my case selections and load them in blocks, on one machine i load these 32, on a different machine, load the other, etc. Also be able to load the preferences for what is visible and what is not on the front panel."

What can affect the size of a front panel object between versions of Windows?

Greetings, all!
I have a client that wants to use a piece of LabVIEW code on Windows XP, Vista, and 7. The application was originally written to run on XP machines, so everything looks OK there. However, on Vista or 7, certain front panel objects appear larger than they do on the XP machine (in one example, all of the string fields in an array of strings are taller). Other objects (such as a text label) appear smaller.
The machines in question all appear to have comparable DPI settings, and monitor resolution does not seem to be a factor. The application uses Application Font in various sizes in the cases of interest. Can anyone suggest some other things we can check?
Thanks!

This issue is coming up more and more lately. Particularly as people move to Win7 machines. I've seen differences between my home Vista machine and my work XP machine.
It comes down to the system fonts used by the different OS's. XP's basic font is Tahoma. Vista uses Segoe. I believe Win7 is the same as Vista, but I'm not sure. The fonts appear similar, but one font or the other is slightly larger. So any features that are based on a font size will change. This includes the sizing of labels. Text within local, shared, global variables, and references. Enough that it can cause wires to move a few pixels on a BD, and objects that are aligned on one system to look slightly misaligned on another.
I think that if you set the fonts you use to a specific font, rather than Application font (which is taken from one of the current Windows font settings, you will avoid the issue. The other possibility is to define which font is used for the application font within your LabVIEW.ini. (Or the application's .ini file if it is built into an .exe.)
Do some searching on the forums for application font, system font, dialog font, windows versions. You'll find quite a few threads where people had different variations of this problem.

How can I create multiple front panels for a single block diagram?

Hello,
I have developed a VI with multiple controls and indicators that needs to run on computers with screen resolutions ranging from 800x600 to 1680x1050. The problem I'm having is that the front panel does not properly scale for this range of resolutions by checking the options in the "VI properties" option. Is there a way to create multiple front panels of various sizes for my block diagram and programmatically select the appropriate front panel based on the screen resolution?
Solved!
Go to Solution.

See the attached Zip file.
I have two different front panels. Open either one and run it. They both call MainCode.vi which takes the references passed to it and register for events. From there, it does all the work of the code you would have put in your front panel .vi.
This way each front panel can be laid out however you want for each screen resolution.
Attachments:
MainCode.zip ‏22 KB

[General Question] redrawing and updating front panel objects

Hello,
I have several questions on this topic.
1) Is there a difference between redrawing and updating the front panel? (I assume so, but when a control is updated it will be redrawn at the same time, right?)
2) Is redrawing = rendering? In the case of decorations I think they need only to be rendered once (if fix/static) and stay in memory so that it is available for the gfx-card...
3) Are decorations redrawn or updated by LabView with every loop?
4) Is there a way to prevent LabView from redrawing and/or updating front panel objects (like controls, indicators and decorations)?
    When I put indicators into case-structures they are only updated when the case in which they are placed is executed but they will be obviously still redrawn.
    In another case when I disable visibility of those indicators they will not be redrawn anymore but be updated in the background.
    So when I put these indicators into a case-structure and combine it with toggling the visibility I could stop LabView from updating and redrawing them.
    Is this correct?
    Is there another way to prevent LabView from redrawing single objects? (at best leave them somehow visible)
Many thanks in advance!

Nocturn wrote:
Hello,
I have several questions on this topic.
1) Is there a difference between redrawing and updating the front panel? (I assume so, but when a control is updated it will be redrawn at the same time, right?)
2) Is redrawing = rendering? In the case of decorations I think they need only to be rendered once (if fix/static) and stay in memory so that it is available for the gfx-card...
3) Are decorations redrawn or updated by LabView with every loop?
4) Is there a way to prevent LabView from redrawing and/or updating front panel objects (like controls, indicators and decorations)?
    When I put indicators into case-structures they are only updated when the case in which they are placed is executed but they will be obviously still redrawn.
    In another case when I disable visibility of those indicators they will not be redrawn anymore but be updated in the background.
    So when I put these indicators into a case-structure and combine it with toggling the visibility I could stop LabView from updating and redrawing them.
    Is this correct?
    Is there another way to prevent LabView from redrawing single objects? (at best leave them somehow visible)
Many thanks in advance!
redraw vs update
Yes threr is a difference. A control is redrawn when LV decides to update the GUI. Look into "syncronous" setting for controls that forces update when value changed. These tags and thesse tags may help out abit.
Q2
Not sure about equality but decoartion may need redrawn if there is overlap of chanable objects.
Q3
i have observed decorations that failed to update on occation so I suspect they are only update when required.
Q4
LV will update the value for a hidden control but will not update its image. Same if the object is ona hidden tab page.
No wawy that I know of to prevent an update of a single object with out going to extremes. The Front pnale property "DeferFPupdate" will inhibit FP updates while true and allow then when set false. I use this when doing a lot fast GUI updates so allow the changes to accumulate and be apllied only once.
Ben
Ben Rayner
I am currently active on.. MainStream Preppers
Rayner's Ridge is under construction

Programmatically generate a new front panel object

I'd like to see an example of how to programmatically generate a new front panel object like a button or sub-panel at run time. Any pointers?
I've looked for examples but don't seem to be having success.

"Controls on the fly" (artwork courtisy of Christian Altenbach) is something I have done on more than one app.
Also check out the Picture control thread for more links and idea.
The easy method is to pre-create and hide.
The amount of code that goes into supporting functional controls is enormous (been ther done that)
Ben
Ben Rayner
I am currently active on.. MainStream Preppers
Rayner's Ridge is under construction

Resizing multiple front panel objects

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