I'm not sure I understand the premise of this. What do you consider to be the limiting factor in viewing/editing clusters on the front panel? Can you provide an example where your property window would be superior to the "normal" way?
Here is my own example of dynamic property grid ...
I had to view the content of a hierarchical cluster to the end user of my application ... In a limited place.
My other problem was, that i wanted to view all kind of cluster or datatype in my viewer dynamicaly.
So i build a XControl which could view evry kind of clusters ... dynamicaly. The datatype of the XControl is a refernce.
To do this i analyse the content of the cluster using references recursively.
I have only one problem with the arrays references ( Which i don't support)
(I can't get the reference of a single array element)
One of my collegue has build something like my XControl using variants. (He supports arrays)
I can solve the problem by myself... but i think this could be usefull for others too ...
And my XControl is developped directly in Labview ...
A control directly integrated in Labview, developped with the inner layer of Labview, should be more powerfull !
Here is a view of my cluster viewer : I don't had the time to build the editing side.
My Xcontrol is only a viewer ... It should be nice to had the same kind of viewer and the ability of editing field by field ... with an apropriate editor ! ( Checkbox for boolean, Enum's, ... )
I have already use the dotnet propertygrid ... in a previous life ... And it was a powerfull tool to create rapidly profesionnal applications.
The dotNet propertyGrid could also be customized to add custom editors, custom contraints checks (When values are dependant)
I would like to push a bit further this idea. This PropertyGrid control could be used the same way with an object. That's what .NET people do. In your class definition you give some attributes to the properties your want to acces and then you just need to wire your object to the control to acces its properties. It's completely generic, transparent and portable. No user interface to adjust. I have an application where I use generic plugin modules. Instead of programming the gui of each module, I would have been very interested in having such a control.
I came across this by accident when looking for a different solution, good work Google!
I'd love to have the above control provided by NI. I would use it immediately to directly edit hierarchical datasets in a MySQL database.
The datatypes in the recordset normally contain Booleans, text, numberic, timestamps and the like. There is currently no way to mix the datatypes in a TreeView control and update the database accordingly. The only way I have seen is the solution above, which spoofs the datatypes using dynamic pop up windows. But what a lot of effort to get to something that should be obvious for
1. Complex cluster navigation
2. Oject property browsing
3. Database interrogation and updating (arguably the same as 2 above, where the object is a recordset, table, etc.)
On a related subject, how about databound controls like VB? That would make it even better.
