can one put a tab control in a cluster?

[Gabi1]

is there a limitation for doing that?

why?

[MichaelAivaliotis]

The short answer is NO. You cannot put a tab control inside a cluster. There are some internal NI technical limitation for this. Here is an excerpt from some info-labview post:

There is a logical problem with tab controls inside clusters. Each control
on a front panel has exactly one owner. The owner can be another control or
the panel itself (which is really just a glorified cluster). The controls
inside a tab control are owned by the tab control and the controls inside
the cluster are owned by the cluster. A control inside a tab control that
is inside a cluster would have to be owned by both the cluster and the tab
control. The tab control would manage the subcontrol's drawing while the
cluster managed the control's data handling. And the tab control itself
would also be owned by the cluster. I can imagine several problems that
could arise trying to set values which are impacted by two separate control
owners. Imagine the strict typedef nightmare that could be constructed!
There's also the point, already made on this list, that tab controls may
contain a mix of controls/indicators whereas clusters are either/or.

[mikeporter]

You can't put a tab in a cluster because it wouldn't make any sense. You se tab control really isn't a control in the usual sense of the word because it doesn't hold any data. To see what I mean, create a tab control with three tabs. Now put a numbic control on each of the tab pages. When you go to the block diagram and you'll see three terminals (plus one for the tab control). The tab does nothing to structure the data and you can largely ignore that the tab exists - unless you want to programatically change the tab page that is being displayed, or for some reason want to know which tab is being displayed. But again this is strictly status information about the interface, it adds nothing to the data.

Mike...

Message Edited by mikeporter on 05-12-2007 05:50 PM

[MichaelAivaliotis]

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@mikeporter wrote:
You can't put a tab in a cluster because it wouldn't make any sense. You se tab control really isn't a control in the usual sense of the word because it doesn't hold any data.

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Actually, it does contain data. it has a data type. I believe it's an enum type. It actually can stand on its' own as an enum data type. The cluster, on the the other hand, does not have a data type until some other control is placed inside it.

Message Edited by Michael Aivaliotis on 05-12-2007 05:54 PM

[Gabi1]

thanks for the info guys.

i do think it would make sense if it was possible, to have a tab control in the cluster. the main reason i like to use tab control is to display - hide controls as function of some other elements in program. but i still want the whole dataset from those tabs.

now to put into context of clusters: i want the full info from all clusters, in a cluster of clusters. yet i can address every cluster specifically. now if every sub cluster could be in a page of a tab control, yet being bundled as one supercluster, that would simplify a bit data handling.

nevertheless the points raised by Michael seems to give good reason why it just is impossible.

Gabi

[MohamadZeidan]

I'm not sure about the arguement of having multiple owners. A tab "control" (or indicator) within a cluster, in the sense discussed, is not different than having a cluster within a cluster or even a tab control wthin a tab control (which I do all the time). 

It really does help a lot to have tab controls within clusters and forcing the tab control as well as everything else on it to all be either controls or indicators isn't any limitation, because whoever wants to use the tab control for organizing a cluster will be using the cluster as either an input or an output (no mix of both), anyway. 

It really would've been much nicer to be able to organize a cluster with tab controls, but now I have to find some other way not to ahve my cluster span multiple screens 😞

[tst]

You can go vote for this idea, which might help future versions of LV to have this - http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Allow-clusters-to-have-quot-pages-quot/idi-p/1481862

You can also read the comments there for some alternatives, which can be relevant.