Embedd a Labview Remote Panel in a .NET application

[Elp]

Hi,

Labview offers since its 6.1 version the remote panel feature that allows
you to control a VI remotely through a web browser. This works thanks to an
activex control, hosted in a web page that displays the VI UI and allows you
to control it.

What i would like to do is embedding this activex control in a .NET windows
application instead of a Web page. Putting an activex control on a Window
form in .NET is usually dead easy: just point the file containing the
activex control and .NET generates all the needed code to add it to your
form. However, i've not been able to find where this file is located for the
Labview remote panel activex. I've tried all the dll files that seemed more
or less related to Labview on my HD
but none worked.


Does anybody knows how i could achieve that?

Thanks.

[rolfk]

Elp wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Labview offers since its 6.1 version the remote panel feature that allows
> you to control a VI remotely through a web browser. This works thanks to an
> activex control, hosted in a web page that displays the VI UI and allows you
> to control it.
>
> What i would like to do is embedding this activex control in a .NET windows
> application instead of a Web page. Putting an activex control on a Window
> form in .NET is usually dead easy: just point the file containing the
> activex control and .NET generates all the needed code to add it to your
> form. However, i've not been able to find where this file is located for the
> Labview remote panel activex. I've tried all the dll files that seemed more
> or less related to Labview on my HD but non
e worked.

Don't count on it to be so easy. Just try to include the Quicktime IE
plugin and I think you will know why. An Active X control does need
almost no methods and properties to be embedable in IE. However such a
control is close to impossible to use in a normal development
environment. The Remote Panel Control may fall in this same category. I
certainly can't see such a control in the Active X object browser in
LabVIEW or Visual C.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> What i would like to do is embedding this activex control in a .NET windows
> application instead of a Web page. Putting an activex control on a Window
> form in .NET is usually dead easy: just point the file containing the
> activex control and .NET generates all the needed code to add it to your
> form. However, i've not been able to find where this file is located for the
> Labview remote panel activex. I've tried all the dll files that seemed more
> or less related to Labview on my HD but none worked.
>
>

Technically the LV ActiveX control is not embeddable. That means that
it will not be listed by other environments as a control, but IE will
accept it. This was done to allow the Remote panels feature to ship
without having to go through extens
ive testing within other containers.
The long story is that MS suddenly dropped support for the Netscape
plugin shortly before we were ready to ship. Since we were planning to
release using the Netscape plugin architecture, this pretty much knocked
us out of the water. So the development of that control was quick and
no more functionality than was needed.

I expect to see the control extended in future editions, though it has
certainly been on the back burner for awhile now. Surprisingly, there
are not that many requests for what you are asking.

Greg McKaskle

[Elp]

"Greg McKaskle" wrote in message
news:QW6kc.42497$Dn1.37118@fe2.texas.rr.com...
> Technically the LV ActiveX control is not embeddable. [...]

Many thanks for your answer. If it doesn't actually solve my problem, it at
least relieves me by providing the explanation of all this mess.

I've been able to find that the Labview activex control was actually located
in the LV7ActiveXControl.dll file but i couldn't understand why this worked
fine in IE and not in Visual Studio or with aximp.exe. Now if you tell me
that this is the expected behaviour, i can give up with that and start to
think of other solutions.

> I expect to see the control extended in future editions, though it has
> certainly been on the back burner for awhile now. Surprisingly, there
> are not that many requests for what you are asking.

I guess that, as in our company, Labview guys and software programmers are
often not the same people and usually don't really understand each other. As
a result, programmers don't want to mess with Labview and Labview guys don't
even know what is possible to do in a software (or how to do it). This gives
us finally heterogeneous applications with a Labview part on one side and a
normal sofware part on the other side, with the 2 sides not (or almost not)
connected and integrated with each other.

As a software programmer who knows nothing about electronic and
instrumentation, it took me months to fully understand what was Labview and
how to work with it (i mean not doing a Labview VI but using an already done
VI in my .NET application). My goal, now that i have a good overview of
what's going on with Labview, is to build an application that combines in a
homogeneous and user-friendly UI, both Labview VIs and "normal" software
stuff so that the users are not lost with plenty of independant components
and can install and use my software without even knowing that the
application uses Labview (most people don't know what is Labview and don't
want to learn how to use it).

All that to say that it would be really great if the activex could be made
"Visual Studio" compatible. I'm pretty sure that if this feature is added
and properly documented (for a non-labview guy), many programmers, who can't
figure out what to do with Labview right now, would quickly understand what
they can do with that and would start using it.

By the way, when using remote panels (Labview 7) in IE, a progress bar is
displayed while the remote panels are being downloaded. Is there a way to
know when the download is complete and the panels displayed? I really need
to be able to catch this event in my application and that's why i was asking
my question at the first place.

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> I've been able to find that the Labview activex control was actually located
> in the LV7ActiveXControl.dll file but i couldn't understand why this worked
> fine in IE and not in Visual Studio or with aximp.exe. Now if you tell me
> that this is the expected behaviour, i can give up with that and start to
> think of other solutions.

I'm glad the info helped. It has been awhile since I've done much with
ActiveX controls, but I'm not sure that this really means the control
can't be used, but it does mean they don't show up in the normal list.

> I guess that, as in our company, Labview guys and software programmers are
> often not the same people and usually don't really understand each other.

Hmm. This can be the case, but in this case it is more a case of
schedule and priorities.

> All that to say that it would be really great if the activex could be made
> "Visual Studio" compatible. I'm pretty sure that if this feature is added
> and properly documented (for a non-labview guy), many programmers, who can't
> figure out what to do with Labview right now, would quickly understand what
> they can do with that and would start using it.
>

I tend to agree that this would be a nice feature, but I'd also
encourage you to look deeper into LV. Most of the programmers on the LV
team, myself included, write all sorts of things in it. It is actually
has a very simple syntax and if you are familiar with any other
functional languages, it is pretty simple to come to grips with.

> By the way, when using remote panels (Labview 7) in IE, a progress bar is
> displayed while the remote panels are being downloaded. Is there a way to
> know when the download is complete and the panels displayed? I really need
> to be able to catch this event in my application and that's why i was asking
> my question at the first place.

There are some remote panel properties and methods under the App class
of the VI Server. I think the App.RemotePanel.ConnectionTo ... will
probably be the most useful. I'm not sure that it indicates the
difference between download and display, but it is worth looking.

Greg McKaskle

[rolfk]

Greg McKaskle wrote:

> I'm glad the info helped. It has been awhile since I've done much with
> ActiveX controls, but I'm not sure that this really means the control
> can't be used, but it does mean they don't show up in the normal list.

Well if it is anything like the Quicktime plugin, it has probably one
method you can use to pass three or for string commands to and that is
it. Also you will have to lookup the GUID of the control and then use
CoCreateObject or something like that with that GUID to create and
instance of it.

> I tend to agree that this would be a nice feature, but I'd also
> encourage you to look deeper into LV. Most of the programmers on the LV
> team, myself included, write all sorts of things in it. It is
actually
> has a very simple syntax and if you are familiar with any other
> functional languages, it is pretty simple to come to grips with.

In my case it wasn't just programming knowledge but the fact that I had
an electrical engineering background. The idea of a LabVIEW diagram
seemed quite logical to me, coming from electronic schematics.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Ben]

>In my case it wasn't just programming knowledge but the fact that I had
>an electrical engineering background. The idea of a LabVIEW diagram
>seemed quite logical to me, coming from electronic schematics.

Ditto that!

Many of the same rules apply to schematics and LV diagrams.
Inputs on the left, outputs on the right, If a vale is wrong in the middle, the issue is probably to left, "Half-splitting"...

Ben

[Steffen.Schmidt]

Hi,

are there any new ideas about this topic? I have the same problem as described above - I want to embed a labview panel into a cvi application.

What I found out is that you can embed the activeX control that is used within IE but the "LVFPPVINAME" in the "OBJECT/EMBED" tag is not set then. Any ideas how I could set this tag?

Thanks, Steffen