crio to host multiple remote front panels

[hhaamm]

Hello all,

I've a question abt remote front panel hosted by a cRIO system (cRIO9068 to be more specific, running RTOS).

I have a top level VI (main) as the start up vi in my cRIO system, and it would call a subvi during run. I'd like to enable remote front panel for both the main vi and the sub vi so that I can see both front panels using a web browser. I'm not sure if such a configuration is possible at all and would like to listen to comments by users who have similar experiences.

Thank you very much!

Best,

Jidong

[TheNIDragon]

Hello hhaamm,

To the best of my knowledge, I don't believe it is possible to host multiple remote front panels from the same executable, and, if it is, would be very difficult. The NI Web Server configuration file only specifies one port on which an executable can run web services, like remote front panels. In, short, I am not sure how you would be able to accomplish this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that what you want to accomplish can be done in many different ways that would be much easier than creating multiple remote front panels.

One of these is to move all of your controls and indicators to the top level VI. i.e. make the data you want to see from the sub-VI an output of the sub-VI and create a new indicator for this on your top-level front panel. This way you can still use a remote front panel and can use different decorations and labels to separate the top-level and sub-VI outputs.

Another way to do this is to use the tab control to create multiple tabs, one for your top-level indicators, and one for your sub-VI indicators. This would still enable you to use remote front panels and would allow for the separation of your different indicators. Here is a note on how to do that:

http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361H-01/lvhowto/creating_tab_controls/

And here is a more in-depth forum post on how to create them:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/how-do-you-create-tabs-on-the-front-panel/td-p/201495

The final way I can think how you would accomplish this is to use a web service instead of remote front panels and host the output of the sub-VI as a separate website. 

Hope this helps!

[hhaamm]

Collin,

Thanks a lot for your comments!

Simply "copying" controls and indicators to the top vi does not solve my problem because I'll need to update the control/indicator values during the run of my sub vi. In order to do that, as far as I know, I have to use lots references to update the value, which is a little complicated for my case.

But your suggestion of tab control does ring a bell for me: do you think setting up a subpanel for my subvi in the top vi should do that trick? I have never done this previously, but I think it may help to view both the front panel of the top and sub vi via remote front panel.

Please kindly comment.

Thanks again!

jidong

[nathand]

As far as I know, there's no special trick here. Make sure you change the build settings so that you don't remove the front panel of the subVI. The VI name is part of the URL to access the remote front panel, so it's possible to load front panels for multiple VIs that are all part of the same executable. Much easier than using a subpanel, which I'm not sure works anyway in remote panels.