Shortcut Menu Utility VIs for OpenG?

[drjdpowell]

Hello,

I use shortcut menus a lot, particularly for setting display options on graphs and charts. I have a pair of VIs that I use for this that leverages the variant data tools of OpenG, and I wondered if they, or something like them, would be a useful addition to OpenG. I’m not sure if they are quite right, but even if they are too specialized for my way of using menus, perhaps there are other more general VIs that exist for helping configure menus. So here they are for comment:

The basic use case is shown in the top image; I have a shift register of program state parameters, including a number of options. When the User right-clicks on a control/indicator (a numeric in this example, but more usually it is a graph or listbox) the options are inserted into the shortcut menu via the VI “Add Items to Menu”. This VI can handle booleans, enums, and clusters thereof. The second image is the front panel and the pulldown menu that results.

The third image shows the Shortcut Menu Selection case, where a second VI, “Change Variant by Menu Tag” (needs a better name) interprets the selected tag and updates the cluster of options accordingly. It also has a “Changed?” output that can be used to trigger redisplay with the new options.

As I said, I’m not sure if these are general enough for OpenG, but perhaps someone else has a set of reuse menu VIs that might be more suitable. Menus are a UI feature that is very valuable, IMO, and they could do with some OpenG support.

— James

Shortcut Menu Utilities.zip

[Phillip Brooks]

Combined with the Variant Configuration File VIs, you could persist an operator's preferences without a separate "configuration options" screen.

[drjdpowell]

I am curious as to your application where you need a changeable menu at run-time?

Ah. I don’t use it to change the menu at run time. I use it to make adding/chnaging options very easy. If I needed a new option, say display the X scale in photon energy instead of wavelength, I would just drop a boolean in the Options cluster and name it “Display X axis as photon energy”, and go change the display update code to read that option. Job done. No need to manually configure a runtime shortcut menu, then write code to interpret the tags and set the appropriate state parameter in the shift register (with all the additional potential for bugs/misspelling). Also, if the Enums are type-defs, the menu will automatically adjust to changes in the type-def, without me having to manually update the runtime menu.

Basically, it avoids doing something (defining the options) twice, in the code and in the menu setup, and avoids the necessity of custom interface code between the two.