How to turn controls to indicators programically?

[krasing]

I'm fairly new to LabView's capabilities outside of data acquisition. I did a little search, but it didn't really come up with anything.

I want to be able to change the status (hidden/visible, enabled/disabled, captions, labels) based upon some input.

Examples to this sort of behavior:
* Changing the color on a colorbox based upon some other value (e.g., green if x<5, yellow if 6<x<9, and red if x>9).
* After setting up configuration, once the program starts doing its thing, have the first step be to gray & disable the controls.
* While the program goes through a complex task, have a caption bar that indicates what step it's at (e.g., configuring, taking measurements, analyzing data, writing reports).
* Alter available options based upon previously selected information. For instance, you could opt to take a new set of measurements (which may have a button to initate the configuration routine), or you could opt to start from a measurement log (which would have a file path control).

I know how to do those sorts of things in something like VB, but not LabView.

Anyone help would be most appreciated.

(Oh, and I do have LV6.0 right now; I'm in the process of upgrading to 8.2, but that'll take a bit o time...)

Message Edited by krasing on 09-06-2006 04:15 PM

[Dennis_Knutson]

You shouldn't have to search any further than your desktop. Go to Help and click on Find Examples. Most of what you want to do is shown in several examples under the Building User Interfaces section. The sub-section called Controlling Front Panel Objects Programatically has a lot on property nodes (which is what you want to use) to change visiblity, enable, disable, etc. For something like writing to you color box, that's just a simple case statement. A case statement can have a number wired to it's selector and you can specify a numeric range. This is explained in the on-line help.

[krasing]

There isn't a section for Building User Interfaces(or for controlling front panel objects programatically) under the Examples in 6.0. The closest I can find is "Building the Front Panel", which isn't under Examples, and it's got the manual instructions that I'm already familiar with.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Sorry, the oldest version of LabVIEW that I have is 6.1 and the example finder in there must have changed from 6.0. What if you go to the search tab in the example finder and enter 'property nodes'? Hopefully, this will list some of the examples such as 'Showing and Hiding Options.VI', String Property Node.VI', and 'Ghost In the Machine.VI'. Though I forgot that the event structure wasn't introduced until 6.1, there should be other examples such as Queued Message Handler.VI that you can look at to see how a simple state machine can be implemented.

[hdferguson3]

I have some code where I do this. If you want I can send you the code so you can see how to do.

[krasing]

That would be great, Doug!

[krasing]

Hey Dennis, I never did find those examples BUT I did find a short tutorial on how to do what I wanted in the included documentation => Tutorial => Activities => Activity 12. Use Property Nodes and Invoke Nodes when I did a search for "property nodes".

Thanks for your help!