Tab caption irritation

[Graeme]

Hi all,

I have a complex (by my standards, ~ 100 VIs) top level VI. At its most basic level it contains two tab controls, each with multiple pages. It's essentially my effort at a test executive (didn't fancy learning, or paying for, TestStand). When the test sequence is complete, I write to one tab control's tab captions some (irrelevant here) default values.

Problem is, instead of those values appearing simultaneously and instantly, they appear at about .5s intervals, i.e. I can watch my tab control's tab captions being updated one by one, half a second apart. The functionality of the top level VI, of course isn't affected, but it's very irritating. It's difficult to post the whole code because of its size, especially as it's such a trivial matter. Earlier in my code, I can update the tab control's captions instantaneously, as you would expect.

To, summarise, has anyone seen a slow update of tab captions, and if they did, did they ever find out why? I'm chopping my code down bit by bit to see what might be causing it. Thanks.

Regards, Graeme.

[LAVA 1.0 Content]

QUOTE(Graeme @ Dec 12 2007, 03:38 PM)

Hi all,

I have a complex (by my standards, ~ 100 VIs) top level VI. At its most basic level it contains two tab controls, each with multiple pages. It's essentially my effort at a test executive (didn't fancy learning, or paying for, TestStand). When the test sequence is complete, I write to one tab control's tab captions some (irrelevant here) default values.

Problem is, instead of those values appearing simultaneously and instantly, they appear at about .5s intervals, i.e. I can watch my tab control's tab captions being updated one by one, half a second apart. The functionality of the top level VI, of course isn't affected, but it's very irritating. It's difficult to post the whole code because of its size, especially as it's such a trivial matter. Earlier in my code, I can update the tab control's captions instantaneously, as you would expect.

To, summarise, has anyone seen a slow update of tab captions, and if they did, did they ever find out why? I'm chopping my code down bit by bit to see what might be causing it. Thanks.

Regards, Graeme.

I can't say I've seen that issue but I have seen tab update issues.

In most cases they update faster if you

1) Defer Front panel Updates

2) Hide the tab control (set visable false)

3) Do your update

4) Show the tab control

5) Undefer FP updates

Like I said, I don't know if that will help!

Off-the-wall question

is the update fast when the tabs are "empty" and slow down when tables graphs etc are filled in?

Ben

[Graeme]

Thanks for the reply Ben. After a bit of inspiration I've moved forward, maybe. I attach two VIs: SlowTabCaptionWriter and FastTabCaptionWriter. SlowTabCaptionWriter is my original effort that updates the Tab control captions (relatively) slowly. FastTabCaptionWriter is my new way of doing it.

Some observations. Slow is sequential and Fast is parallel. Given that, you might well expect Fast to be the faster, which it is: it updates the Tab control captions instantaneously, which is what I want. However, sometimes, Slow DOES update the Tab control captions instantaneously, although not often. Odd! Odder still, earlier in my top level VI Slow works fine every time. The last spanner in the works is this: once, Fast updated the Tab controls backwards once, and slowly (relatively), 9 to zero, but I've never seen it since. I don't know how the Index Array function works, but perhaps Fast could do with error cluster wiring, or sequence structuring, to avoid it going backwards.

I can't help feeling there's something buggy here, but I doubt I could ever prove it. It may just be bad LabVIEW programming practice on my part.

Regards, Graeme.