Waveform graph plot legend in labview 8.5 won't respond to arrow keys?

[chilly_charly]

---

billings11 a écrit:

Last thing I did was a brand new clean install of the DVD and it doesn't help.

---

May be you should try using a downloaded version from the NI site, just in case the problem is with your DVD (???)

[billings11]

I doubt there is anything wrong with the DVD as it didn't give me an error message or anything.  But I was trying to evaluate 8.2.1 and 8.5 on the same machine to decide which one (if either) I should upgrade to, and both installs seem all screwy and I can't seem to get them right.  When I uninstall 8.5 it really doesn't seem to actually delete many files.  The whole directory is still there, but the registry entries are removed.  I'm just going to delete the whole NI directory and start over.

[Travis_M.]

It seems to work fine on my machine too... Honestly, though, while it seems unique to billing's machine, I don't think a reinstall would fix the problem since all that drawing code would probably be in LabVIEW.exe or one of it's DLLs and it seems as though LabVIEW is loading and executing properly with other drawing tasks (can you confirm that?).  Perhaps it's something with the particular keyboard not sending the same ASCII values for the arrows, or something weird like this.  I'd start by just using a blank VI with a new waveform graph and seeing how that behaves.  Then, I'd check the LabVIEW settings and/or delete the LabVIEW.ini file.

If you've tried a repair and or deleted LabVIEW files directly your installation could be in an inconsistent state and probably needs to be more than reinstalled.  I'd call up NI support directly to get a copy of MSI Blast (I am not able to post it for public download.  don't tell anybody, but you might be able to scour the net and find a copy without having to contact an AE) to remove any remnant MSI installers that are registered as being installed through windows but may not be present on your system.  Remember, like all Windows installers, ours is made up of many components which get registered with windows.  Removing folders and files that were installed with software without going through add/remove programs or the program's uninstaller can lead to undefined behavior and bad installation states. Hopefully, though, you don't have to go through too much effort to resolve this problem.

[billings11]

To date I've never manually deleted anything from the NI directory except from the user.lib section.  This computer has been through many installs.  It has 6.1, 7.1, 8.2, then 8.5, then uninstalled 8.5 and installed 8.21, then reinstalled 8.5, but NI-Motion, NI-DAQmx, and almost all of the toolkits on the re-install of 8,5 went to the 8.21 directory.  And I noticed when I uninstalled 8.5 it never removed the labview 8.5 directory and some of its contents.  When I reinstalled 8.5, it somehow kept all my user settings (like turning autosave off) like it never deleted labview.ini from the 8.5 directory when it uninstalled.  So then I uninstalled again, uninstalled all toolkits and NI motion, NI Daq, etc.  Then reinstalled the whole 8.5 install from the DVD with all the device drivers, NI-Motion etc.

So anyway, I can confirm that the only place I see this error so far is the waveform graph plot legend.  I can move the graph itself with the arrow keys, but not the legend.  Also when I click on the legend instead of putting dotted lines around the whole legend it only puts lines around one of the waveforms.  Its very strange but I guess its not a normal part of labview 8.5.  If I create a new waveform graph it seems to be fixed.  Once I get all the toolkits in the right places (and mass-compile the toolkits in 8.2 to save over the LV5 vi's that are still shipping in the toolkits) I can try opening other apps to see if more waveform graphs have the same problem.

[chilly_charly]

Ah ! *That* was your problem !

In fact, you didn't select the legend, but part of the legend only ! To ease your selection, first desactivate the auto-select tool, then slowly hoover the mouse pointer over the legend border, and the proper selection dotted rectangle will appear. Now you can click and your arrows will work fine !

[Travis_M.]

OK, I think I understand now...

You can't move the individual plots in the plot legend with the arrow keys.  Neither can I.  But I can't seem to create any waveform graph (classic or otherwise) where I can even select the individual plots without selecting the entire plot legend so I can't test this in 8.2.  In your example, if you click up a little bit to select the entire legend, are you able to move it with the arrow keys?

With regards to the uninstaller, by design, we (or any MSI installer) does not uninstall user files which are those files that are in the directory but not installed with the program.  We don't want to be in the business of deleting files that users create and have stored in the NI directory.  Can you imagine what a problem that would create...?  Anyway, as a result, LabVIEW.ini and any other files created after the install and not a component of another install remain.  It's up to you to decide whether or not to keep those around, but after you go through the official add/remove process if you want to delete the NI folder I believe it is safe to do so.

have a great weekend-

[chilly_charly]

Sorry, no time to edit my message : The right text is bellow

Ah ! *That* was your problem !

In fact, you didn't select the legend, but part of the legend only ! To ease your selection, first desactivate the auto-select tool, then slowly hoover the mouse pointer over the legend border, until the de-dimensionning spots appear, this will help you visualize the legend border. Click and the proper selection dotted rectangle will appear. Now  your arrows should work fine !

[billings11]

That's very wierd.  I've never seen it try to only select a single channel of the graph until now.  I couldn't get it to select the whole legend.  But you are right, now that I carefully hover the selection tool on the 1-pixel-wide line of the edge of the graph for a second or two, a dotted line shows up and lets me select the whole legend.  So the arrow keys do work once you figure out how to select the legend.