Darren's Occasional Nugget 01/26/2012

[Darren]

It's been a while since I've posted one of these.  But I discovered this trick earlier this week (which ended up being the solution to a tricky UI issue I had), so I had to share it.  Have you ever noticed the "Byte Offset from Point" method of the String class?

Yeah, I hadn't noticed it either.  But it turns out that this nifty little method will tell you which character is being displayed in a string control at a particular coordinate.  In my case, I was drawing a string image within a picture control, and I needed to know when the user was hovering over certain text in the picture with his mouse.  So I took the mouse coordinates over the picture, converted them into coordinates on a dummy string control I had in another VI with the same text in it, and got the hovered-over character.  Pretty cool!

This method has been publicly available since at least LabVIEW 8.6...I didn't check any earlier.  The demo VI (saved in 8.6) is attached below. 

[SteveChandler]

Weird!

[Darin.K]

I fell into and out of love with this one.  To see one reason why move the mouse to the far right of the first line.

[Darren]

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@Darin.K wrote:

I fell into and out of love with this one.  To see one reason why move the mouse to the far right of the first line.

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Hah, I hadn't noticed that.  Well, rough around the 'edges' I guess.  (groan)

Thankfully this issue doesn't seem to affect my picture control use case.

[SteveChandler]

Is that a bug?

I guess as a workaround you could detect which line the mouse is on, get that line, then check if the character is the first one in the next line and not the last character of the current line.

[Darren]

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@Steve Chandler wrote:

Is that a bug?

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I just filed CAR 335004 about this issue.  So for now, anyway, it's a bug.  🙂

[Ben]

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@Steve Chandler wrote:

Is that a bug?

I guess as a workaround you could detect which line the mouse is on, get that line, then check if the character is the first one in the next line and not the last character of the current line.

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I think that was what Darren was think when he wrote "(grone)".

Ben

[Darin.K]

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@Ben wrote:

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I think that was what Darren was think when he wrote "(grone)".

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I wish, actually he was referring to the quite bad pun that proceeded "groan".  Once again people, I try to tell you that comedy is best left to us trained professionals. 

[JÞB]

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@Darin.K wrote:

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@Ben wrote:

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I think that was what Darren was think when he wrote "(grone)".

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I wish, actually he was referring to the quite bad pun that proceeded "groan".  Once again people, I try to tell you that comedy is best left to us trained professionals. 

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So of course I had to look.

A trained C-el could do better (Groan)

[sletrab]

Hello Darren,

I missed your weekly nuggets so much!

Good to see you back!

Sletrab