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LabVIEW Idea Exchange
As soon as we have more complicated data structures (e.g. clusters of arrays), a large portion of the FP real estate is wasted taken up by borders, frames and trims, etc.
We need a palette full of "Amish" 😉 controls, indicators, and containers that eliminate all that extra baggage. We have a few controls already in the classic palette, but this needs to be expanded to include all types of controls, including graphs, containers, etc.
A flat control consists of a plain square and some text (numerical value, string, ring, boolean text, etc). A flat container is a simple borderless container. A flat graph is a simple line drawing that would look great on a b&w printer. A flat picture ring looks like the image alone.
They have a single area color and a single pixel outline, if both have the same color, the outline does not show. They can also be made transparent, of course. If we look at them in the control editor, there are only very few parts.
Now, why would that be useful?
Let's have a look a the data structure in the image. There is way too much fluff, distracting from the actual data. If we had flat objects, the same could look as the "table" below. Note that this is now the actual array of clusters, no formatting involved! It is fully operational, e.g. I can pick another enum value, uncheck the boolean, or enter data as in the cluster above.
Many years ago in LabVIEW 4, I actually made a borderless cluster container in the control editor and it looked fine, but it was difficult to use because it was nearly impossible the grab the right thing with the mouse at edit time.
The main problem of cours is that the object edges completely overlap, making targeted seletion with the mouse impossible. (For example the upper right corner pixel is the corner of an array, a cluster, another array, and an element at the same time.)
So what we need is a layer selection tool that allows us to pick what we want (similar to tools in graphics editing software). It could look similar to the context help shown in the picture with selection boxes for each line. Picking an object would show the relevant handles so we can intereact with the desired object. Another possibility would be to hover over the corner and hit a certain key to rotate trough all near elements until the right element is selected, showing it's resize handles. I am sure there are other solutions.
As a welcome side effect, redrawing such a FP is relatively cheap.
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Available in LabVIEW NXG 1.0. The default style of front panel objects in NXG is a flat style.