I'd also chime in that you can achieve pretty good pseudo-control of VI panels
with Internet Toolkit CGIs and a little bit of sweat.
In LabVIEW's current incarnation, you'll never be able to duplicate behavior
like turning panel knobs or typing text directly into controls. However, what
you can do is include HTML forms elements below/beside your panel that tie in
to CGI VIs on the back end that use VI Server to update panel control values
and, thus, control the VI. You can also (to a limited extent) simulate button
action directly on the panel image using HTML imagemaps.
Depending on your level of familiarity with CGI and HTML concepts,
accomplishing the above can range from pretty straightforward to very
difficult. We're all looking forward to the day when a user can interact
seamlessly with a LabVIEW panel via a Web browser, but until that day arrives,
there are some pretty good existing methods you can use to achieve a
reasonable degree of application control. Here's an example that I wrote some
time ago:
http://digital.ni.com/explprog.nsf/websearch/42cf377dd207ecc786256530006876c0
Regards,
John Lum
National Instruments
Greg McKaskle wrote:
> > Yes I can see that. The problem is to view the VI-file with the help of
> > a WEB-browser. The examples you thinkig of uses a VI-file to read from a
> > VI-server(TCP/IP). In other words you need to install LabView on the
> > client machine. I don't want this....I want everyone who is using a
> > WEB-browser to access the page....
> >
>
> If you have 5.1, then you don't have the entire internet toolkit, but
> you do have the web publishing basics. You should be able to find out
> about it in the 5.1 documentation addendum, not in the normal manuals,
> but in the addendum with all of the other 5.1 features. The first step
> is to turn it on and setup the security and access on the preference
> pages. Then you can open some VIs and set them to running. Open a web
> browser and open the Examples.htm file in the www directory, in fact do
> that first as it has setup information as well.
>
> Note that you will be able to display the panels, but you can't interact
> with them because LV isn't currently a plug-in or helper app. You can
> go the datasocket route if you want to build pages that contain
> datasocket links back to a VI that publishes values on datasockets. You
> can also use the add-on Internet Toolkit which makes CGI and HTML
> generation possible/easy. If what you are wanting to do is publish HTML
> pages, this is a great way to go, but its lower level than datasockets
> or pushing JPEGs.
>
> Greg McKaskle