long pull down menu with no vertical scrollbar

[stoeckel]

Folks,

it's been already 3.5 years ago when we had to learn that there is no way to have a long pull down menu control without a vertical scrollbar. See

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=217428&query.id=395029#M217428

Now, after we got LabVIEW 8.6.1 there is still no opportunity to suppress the vertical scrollbar though there is a property node "Vertical Scrollbar Visible" for combo boxes. As Smercurio already observed in 2006 with the LV 8.2 combo box, this property node does not have any effect, probably due to a bug. This behaviour is still the same with LV 8.6.1.

Just a few days ago a user of our software complained that items in the menu would be missing. In fact they weren't but rather he oversaw the scrollbar and did not scroll down the column -- that's why he didn't find the menu items. In general it's quite inconvenient if one has to scroll down first before one can select a particular item. In most cases the scrollbar is simply useless since the panel is tall enough to show all menu items at the same time.

How are you designing a long pull down menu on your user interface? Any ideas how to circumvent the nasty scrollbar?

Sorry for the rather lengthy post. I am afraid you had to use the vertical scrollbar while reading through my text...

Thanks for any contribution,

Peter

[smercurio_fc]

If you're running on Windows you can use the ActiveX Combobox.

[stoeckel]

Smercurio,

interesting suggestion. Is there any possibility to make the combo box look more like a ring control? I tried to customize the control in that way but there are only very limited options. The ActiveX Property Browser doesn't help either. What is behind Advanced > "design mode"? Unfortunately NI doesn't provide any description for the combo box.

Thanks,

Peter

[smercurio_fc]

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stoeckel wrote:

Unfortunately NI doesn't provide any description for the combo box.

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That's because it's not from NI. It's from Microsoft, so all the documentation can be found on MSDN. The one I used in that example is the ActiveX version. There's a .NET version as well. 

[cookjr · Accepted solution]

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stoeckel wrote:

Any ideas how to circumvent the nasty scrollbar?

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I think this does what you are asking.  It works for any named numeric control, and I think a little modification will make it work for a combo box too.

Jim

[smercurio_fc]

Clever, but that's cheating.

I suspect a more elegant solution would probably be an XControl. 

[cookjr]

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smercurio_fc wrote:

Clever, but that's cheating.

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It gets the job done.  

I tried an XControl, but couldn't figure out a way to keep the context menu for the ring control.  Without the context menu, it's difficult to edit the items in the control.

So I settled for the solution provided.