How to use REFNUM to communicate between Tab Control Indicator panel and subVI without explicit connections?

[Qian]

Hi! One of my test programs needs to show many readings on the fron panel. I used a 4 page Tab Control to separate
different catagory readings and put them in the clusters. If I connect these indicator clusters to the subVI by refnum explicitly, the program runs too slow. So I am trying to make the subVI communicate with the front panel without explicite refnum connection. So far, the subVI can communicate with the clusters on the front panel but not on the Tab Controls. Is anyone can give me some ideas how to communicate/pass the data to the clustes on the
Tab Control? Thanks,

[Ankita]

Hi Qian,

If I understand the question correctly; you want to know if there is some other way to access the controls on the tab control without actually using a refnum from the VI that has the controls.

To answer this question I would say that LabVIEW is a very powerful programming language and one of the very cool features is that it gives you access to all the controls on a VI into another VI without actually passing any data between them.

The best way to do this would be using VI Server. The functions that you need to call would be Open VI reference to open a reference to your VI having all the controls. Then use a combination of Invoke nodes and Property node get access to the controls on the front panel of your VI.

Do let me know if you have further questions.
Ankita A.

[tst]

Another piece of data that may be relevant. A tab control has a property called "Pages". This is an array of references to it's pages. If you select one of these refs and wire that into a property node, you can get an array of references to all the controls on that page (including the clusters). You'll have to identify the control you want. You can either go through the entire array and match it by type\name, or if you want - the array is sorted by tabbing order. You can access a control like that if you trust the tabbing order won't change.