Custom controls

[jhoskins]

Hi guys,

I have come to place of the labview gods :worship: to ask a simple mortal question on the best way to create basic custom controls. like you guys did with open G controls where you have the radio buttons, Directional buttons and the copy paste butttons. How did you guys do that. I would like to make a bunch of them that look good but cannot. :headbang: I would love to Contribute to open G. Anything I could do for the labview community I would. Anyway just asking any tips would be greatly appreciated and anything I can do for you guys just let me know. This forum has been a great resource for me. Thanks open G for all the great tools.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

To start off, just to clarify. The LAVA Forums are not OpenG. I realize that some OpenG contributors hang-out here but if you want to give praise to OpenG, the best way to do this is to go to the OpenG forums and tell them how much you love them in person. While you're there you can also donate some money :

OpenG Website

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OK... About custom controls. Do you know about the control editor? That's the first place to start. There are many ways to access it but the best is to right-click on a front-panel control and select Advanced>>Customize. This will pop-up a window called the control editor. Once your in there you can manipulate all the objects to your hearts content.

One thing you have to realize is that each control is composed of many parts. You can manipulate these parts and even replace them with pictures of your own. To see these parts you must click on the icon on the button bar that looks like a wrench. This will cause labview to break apart the control into several components. You will see each element highlited with a white box. If you use your mouse pointer you can click and drag each part of the control and spread it about.

So now how do many people create cool controls. Simple, you just hack away at the control using the control editor and replace the parts you want with pictures of your own. The radio button control you mention is actually a slider. Yes! The black dot of the radio button is the slider pointer that has been replced by a black dot. The circles are pictures of circles copied from a dialog button radio control of windows.

I hope I gave you an idea of how this is all done. Cheers! :beer:

:arrow: Here's a challenge question for you control editor experts out there: Each boolean control has 3 visible parts. The label, caption and boolean text. There is one exception to this, what is it?

[David Wisti]

:question: Each boolean control has 3 visible parts. The square and round LED also have decal.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

:question: Each boolean control has 3 visible parts. The square and round LED also have decal.

Correct!

And why is this significant? It is nice because the decal is a clickable object which toggles the logic on the boolean. This is great because you can replace it with a custom graphic and use it as an additional part of the control which can be clicked.

[jlada]

In the same vein, is it possible to replace the visual components of a control with with a non-rectangular import?

I have recently created a circular joystick made up of eight boolean pushbuttons in a ring with a hollow center. The intent was to create two half-round booleans to fill the center, but because I cannot seem to import anything but rectangular bit maps, there is always an overlap problem in the center. I have attached a image showing the cluster. As can be seen, I have resorted to using two oval buttons instead - not what I had hoped for.

Jeff

[Michael Aivaliotis]

Well, you can create the semi-circles in a drawing package and import them into the center button. To avoid the overlap issue why not send the center button to the all-back layer? They would then be covered by the surrounding buttons.

[jlada]

Thanks for the reply Michael;

The problem is that the surrounding buttons are also rectangular imports. When the center buttons are pushed to the back, they are then overlapped by the surrounding ones. The only way i can figure to do this would be to be able to import non-rectangular images. It must be possible somehow because the oval buttons from NI don't have a rectangular footprint.

Jeff

[Chris]

Hi Jeff,

I don't know about making non-rectangular buttons, but I made up a VCR control that was made up of rectangular buttons, with a little gap between each one and the background of each button image was set to transparent.

There have been no problems with the user clicking on one button but activating another.

(see attached to see what I mean).

[jlada]

Chris;

I'll give that a try, thanks.

Very nice graphics by the way. How did you create thos buttons?

Jeff