How to guide for standalone application users

[X.]

I find myself rewriting the same basic description of how to use some of the default controls I use in apps I release as standalone applications, and that strikes me as particularly wasteful of my time. For instance, XY Graphs and Vision Image Display indicators are rather sophisticated objects, and not all their functionalities are self-explanatory.

There ought to be some NI-produced documents describing how to interact with controls at runtime. However, I have been unable to find anything of the kind by a simple online search. Manual pages for the LabVIEW developers are served first, and there might be some interesting ones further down, but that is precisely my point: if this information exists, it is not readily accessible.

Obviously, some control customization can be done programmatically (or statically), so in general, exhaustive description of these controls would be an overkill most of the time, but with the proper license to reuse, these (online) documents could be a convenient basis for custom manuals.

My question is therefore: do these description exist, and if yes, where are they to be found?

[Henrik_Volkers]

Good point!  Subscribed 🙂

[DiegoH214]

Hello X.

I wonder what documents are the ones that you are looking for. The LabVIEW help documents cover almost all the functionality and there are White papers, Knowledgebase articles and community examples available that cover the functionality of controls and indicators.

Still, I think your idea for a custom manual could help users, Maybe it would be more appropriate for the ideas exchange.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/More-Documents/ct-p/more-documents

Diego H

National Instruments.

[X.]

Please show me a single document explaining the function and usage of the XY Graph control:

- how to change a plot style;

- how to create cursor and which kind; how to use them;

- how to navigate through the graph (zoom and scale palette);

- how to edit scales;

- how to use annotations;

- what is the difference betwee export data, export date to excel, export simplified image and  copy data;

- etc.

from a run time front panel user perspective.

Same for the Vision toolkit image display control. Same for any control, really.

I know all this, but new users not familiar with LabVIEW, may have some issues figuring it out. They will eventually get most of it by trial and error, but the same way we can learn how to improve our LabVIEW coding by falling in the same trap over and over again, and stumbling on random nuggets, this is far from the most efficient approach.

I can and will post this to the IE, but I first wanted to make sure I was not missing something obvious. After all, these controls have been out there for more than 20 years, so you would think they have been extensively documented.