Mouse click on hidden/transparent FP

[pysenberg]

Hi all,

So I'm working on making a certain vi a remote panel. However this vi is quite complex with a lot of property nodes events which makes remote panel connection can be a bit unreliable cross-site because of the amount of data being transferred.

What i'm trying to do to solve this is use a secondary vi that grabs an image of the first vi's front panel at a given frequency so that any changes are seen with out having to send too much data back and forth between the server and client. Basically all we should see is the change in pixels. When a user clicks on the image on this secondary vi i would like to simulate a click on the first vi at the same co-ordinates which should give me full control. I would use the secondary vi as the remote panel instead. I'm guessing this is how remote desktop would work?

I have looked into simulating mouse click events using the User32.dll and it works great > http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/9BB3211F3469623649257360000E272C

However my problem is that this vi may not be the top vi or may be transparent at times. So my question is, is there a way of simulating a mouse click on a specific vi even if its not on top or hidden?

This idea may be too crazy to work and in that case any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

 

[hooovahh]

You mentioned remote desktop.  What's wrong with just using that?  If you do something custom you will likely run into issues where taking an image doesn't quite work right.  Like I suspect that the right click menus won't be included in a method on the VI reference to get an image of the front panel.  Maybe invoking a screenshot with kernel32.dll will include it.  What you are describing is probably possible, but the amount of effort involved would be a lot, and there are already other tools for sharing a computer (VNC, RDP, TeamViewer, etc.) and would work probably just as well.