Reusable Options Dialog Based on Actor Framework

[Elijah_K]

Release Notes

Application developed by Elijah Kerry, CLA – National Instruments

Latest version: 1.0.2.17 (Alpha)

This is the third public release of this library. It is used in a forthcoming version of the Measurement Utility, but valuable enough to warrant sharing it as a separate reusable library.

Overview

This library provides a reusable framework for reading parameters from a configuration file on disk, displaying them to a user and returning them to a calling framework.  A developer who wants to inherit this dialog needs to create a child class of the Configuration Dialog Actor and implement the following:

- Define the configuration parameters in the private data control of the child class

- Extend the store and read methods (by inheriting them) to define how these parameters are loaded and stored to disk

- Override the 'Store Static VI References Methods' to add static references to the VIs that should be displayed in the SubPanel

- Implement the SubPanel displays using the template in the example (shown below):

Future Features

Installs the template for a SubPanel item into the 'Create Projects' dialog

This Package depends on these other packages:

OpenG Application Control Library >= 4.1.0.7

OpenG File Library >= 4.0.1.22

OpenG Variant Configuration File Library >= 4.0.0.5

[NJKirchner]

FYI, the dialog needs some work if you're working on a non win7 default display setup

[Elijah_K]

Not to mention the ability to set the title!  Oops...

What specific changes would you want to see for your display settings?  Less margin at the top?

[Elijah_K]

How's this?  (more like the LabVIEW dialog)

[NJKirchner]

Better

Is it resizeable?

[Elijah_K]

Of course it is!

[jennapark86]

Hi Elijah, is localization possible with this approach? like in... http://www.ni.com/example/31257/en/ (LCE)

[St3ve]

Any chance of a version of this that I can open in LV2012?

[MrZiii]

Any chance of a version of this that I can open in LV2012? [2]

Tried to convert from a labview 2013.

It showed an error pointing that two VIs had objects that is not present in previous version:

Display new Configuration Subpanel.vi

Construct Configuration Object

I am trying to see if i can work around but if anyone already have it working for LV2012 and can share it I'll be grateful

[MrZiii]

It says: "Missing oject. The object Attachment does not exist in the previous version"

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Don't worry about that. The "attachment" is just the arrow connecting a comment to the thing it is commenting about. It is a comment change only.

[MrZiii]

Thanks.

It' working now. I thought that the problems i was having came from the missing object, but i had a problem in my code. If have any other issue I'll post here, but it seems to be smoothly.

Elijah_K thanks for sharing this code!

[danielb85]

Hey Elijah_K, this is a very useful piece of code.

I usually have the problem of wanting to configure multiple things at a time, and which of these things are available for configuration is sometimes determined at runtime. Have you considered setting the Config Actor up in a way to support Nested Actors in such a way that the root Config Actor would handle the UI and the nested actors only supply the static subpanel VI refs and the storage routines?

I might look into it at some point.