Prevent weird "shadowing" of disabled controls?

[Justin Goeres]

Greetings.

Suppose I have a control (say a DigNum) on my front panel, sitting in front
of a Smooth Horizontal Box or some other decoration. When I disable & grey
the control, it creates a funky rectangular shadow around the entire control
(and its label) which greatly pollutes the look of the decoration behind it.
The only workaround I've found for this is to repaint the Smooth Horizontal
Box to be the same color as this "shadow" effect, but generally I'd like to
be able to grey out controls without regard for the type of decoration that
surrounds them.

I can attach an example of the problem if needed, but I run into this so
frequently that I'm sure others have noticed it, as well. My question is
this: Is there any way
to coax the control to grey-out in such a way as to
preserve the transparency of the area around it?

I'm using LV6.0.2.

Thanks in advance.
Justin Goeres
Pleasanton, CA

[Labviewguru]

Justin,

Here's an easy fix for you. Instead of setting the control to disabled and greyed, why not set it to disabled, and change the color of it. You can even build a subVI that does this for you, using references adn property nodes.

I created a very simple VI for you that accomplishes this exact feat. If you want to make it more flexible, to control other types of controls, you will have to do some work with references I'm afraid.

Hope this helps

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> Suppose I have a control (say a DigNum) on my front panel, sitting in front
> of a Smooth Horizontal Box or some other decoration. When I disable & grey
> the control, it creates a funky rectangular shadow around the entire control
> (and its label) which greatly pollutes the look of the decoration behind it.
> The only workaround I've found for this is to repaint the Smooth Horizontal
> Box to be the same color as this "shadow" effect, but generally I'd like to
> be able to grey out controls without regard for the type of decoration that
> surrounds them.
>
> I can attach an example of the problem if needed, but I run into this so
> frequently that I'm sure others have noticed it, as well. My question is
> this: Is there any way to coax the control to gre
y-out in such a way as to
> preserve the transparency of the area around it?
>


The controls blend with the background. The background is the object
that owns them rather than the object behind them. If the graphic is a
cluster, then everything will work fine.

Greg McKaskle

[Vaibhav]

Hi Greg,

I am with the similar situation here, and Ravens Fan tipped me of this old thread.

Well, from the situation, I perfectly understand that the object adapts to its container rather than the object behind. I am also floating an indicator on the area of a tab panel, but not dropping on the tab. Since the tab is now a system type, on Vista it looks white and background is gray. So the disabled and grayed indicator looks not white/transparent but rather gray (color of front panel).

I would not change the color of front panel, since this would make the indicator white (when disabled and grayed out), and tab would be gray (if on xp, for e.g.).

What do you mean by cluster object? to create a cluster indicator?

[F._Schubert]

Greg sleeps/dreams/codes behind a blue curtain, as rumors tell. Don't know if you can wake him up after 7 years. We might need to wait 77 until he speaks to us again.

Felix

[Vaibhav]

Oh, I hope my question wakes the legendary Greg up after all these year. Though I doubt, since it's not a very powerful question. 😞

[Ben]

Yes he is unlikely to reply (and I won't send an e-mail to wake him up).

But I can report that Greg is still alive and well and is quietly working behind the scenes to to produce some of the most amazing things we have seen out of NI in the last couple of years.

Unless you are still developing in LV 4, you are probably profiting from his work.

Ben

[Vaibhav]

I see.

Let's not disturb him then, and wait for what comes out of his secret lab.

We can continue the discussion on the original thread then, since we're already discussing about the cluster.