Skinnable Front Panels and Xcontrols

[Val Brown]

I'm wondering if anyone has come up with a way to use the "Skin" process of WMP but in re: to LV Front Panels and XControls? It seems to me that it would add quite a lot to the UI experience if an end user could choose amongst a set of "skins" for an app and/or specify/create new ones.

Any good ideas of a place to start?

[Yair]

Here are several options I can think of -

1. Control the color properties - this at least gives you some level of control and is very easy.
   
2. I think that in 8.2, you can make parts of the controls transparent and apply the skin to the pane (each pane can have a skin, but I don't know if you can control it dynamically). You will then probably need a subpanel for each control (sounds ugly).
   
3. Use typedef controls. By removing the typedef control from where LV knows it is, you can force LV to look for it and tell it where to find the new one.
   Problems - not dynamic (can only be done when loading), it's not choosing (only if LV will not find the controls, you can tell it where to find them and it takes time), not sure it can be done with an executable (LV used to have an option of controlling whether executables still use typedefs or not, but I don't know if newer versions still have this).
   You could probably do this by having your interface loaded dynamically (maybe in a subpanel) and then copy the controls to where LV expects them to be. That way, you could also do this dynamically by unloading the VI, copying the controls and then reloading the VI.
   
4. Use scripting to replace the controls. This requires the VI to be idle and I don't think it would work in an executable.
   
5. Probably the most "skinny" skin would be to create your controls as pictures and use the picture control to generate your interface. Once you do that, you will probably need some sort of framework to be able to manage working with the picture control (placement of control, detecting events, etc.). You can find some examples of working with the picture control here.
   

[Val Brown]

Here are several options I can think of -

...Probably the most "skinny" skin would be to create your controls as pictures and use the picture control to generate your interface.

Yes, well that's what I was thinking and I was kind of hoping someone might have already done something just like this as an eg. I'm looking through the various threads to see what shows up. I'm glad to see that the PCT is actually being used creatively.