saving and loading control properties

[shoneill]

Quick question,

Does anyone know of an "easy" way to save and load pre-defined appearences or "skins" for controls and indicators?

I had hoped LV 8.0 did this in the property explorer, but having just checked it out, it doesn't seem to.

I basically want to be able to define the appearance of indicators (XY graphs particularly) based on calling up either ini files or otherwise.

I want to avoid writing a cumbersome cluster-based read and write routine for each and every type of control (Split into classes of course, but still.....)

Shane.

[falkpl]

I have been working on the same problem and have put some thought into a toolkit for GUI development, where the interface state can be cached to an XML file and reloaded, each file contains a skin, but I can never get enough time to work on this.  I wish Ni would have put this effort into labview and was also disappointed to see that there is still no progress here. 

Paul

[shoneill]

Falkpl,

OK, I see I'm not the only one with the problem.  Therefore the chance that I've simply overseen something has been reduced.

Come on NI, all kinds of small programs have support for skins, why can't we.  All I need personally is to be able to access a single cluster with ALL sub-elements of the current control display options in it (Value, Reference and so on can be left out).  A single property called "All properties" or something similar would already solve my problem.

Shane.

[tst]

How about this?

[shoneill]

Thanks tst,

That's pretty much exactly what I was referring to.  Good job I didn't waste any time trying to implement my own version.  And thanks too to Konstantin if he's reading this.  Anyone who might be remotely interested in this (And that should be more or less all of us) should have a look at the link tst provided

Tst, this is an occasion where your old avatar would fit better.

"Here I come......."

Thanks

Shane

[falkpl]

Thanks tst

I will add the link to my labview folder.  The property saver will be a useful feature and would be a great method to have added to all gi objects, like Gobject->SaveState(file) and Gobject->LoadState(File), this could be polymorphic and also include versioning information and even allow for some metadata about the object.  Here you could make skins of a vi and it would save all the objects in a standard form.

Paul

[tst]

Hopefully this will be included in OpenG (look here).