[New Feature] Show Hidden Controls While Editing

[Christina_R]

To improve the experience of editing panels that have hidden controls/indicators, you can show them when editing a VI.

To use this feature, select Edit»Show Hidden Controls While Editing from the menu.

Hidden controls will appear annotated with an outline:

You can interact with hidden controls at edit time the same as if they were not hidden. They will automatically hide when the VI runs.

This feature originated from a suggestion submitted on NI Idea Exchange by NI Discussion Forums member tst.

[tst]

Nice to see that it was implemented.

Some comments after some initial playing:

1. I don't like the visual appearance. I feel it's too subtle and that maybe something like tinting or transparency would have been better (although presumably more processor intensive).
2. I don't really like the toggling behavior. It's a bit hidden in the Edit menu, it's a bit weird that it's global (although I understand that's compatible with the grid alignment toggle) and I don't like that it's not persistent and resets when I restart LV.
3. If the boolean text is outside the bounds of the boolean control, the border seems to wrap around it. See the attached VI.
4. If you customize a hidden control and then apply the changes, the control becomes visible.

[wiebe@CARYA]

How does this work when (hidden) controls overlap (shown controls)?

I have situations where two or more clusters overlap, and only one is shown to the user. I can now edit each cluster, by showing it, and hiding the other controls. But if the hidden controls are editable, that probably won't work anymore?

I'll test myself at some point... 

EDIT: We could really use dynamic control creation (and removal)...

[Christina_R]

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@tst wrote:

Nice to see that it was implemented.

Some comments after some initial playing:

1. I don't like the visual appearance. I feel it's too subtle and that maybe something like tinting or transparency would have been better (although presumably more processor intensive).
2. I don't really like the toggling behavior. It's a bit hidden in the Edit menu, it's a bit weird that it's global (although I understand that's compatible with the grid alignment toggle) and I don't like that it's not persistent and resets when I restart LV.
3. If the boolean text is outside the bounds of the boolean control, the border seems to wrap around it. See the attached VI.
4. If you customize a hidden control and then apply the changes, the control becomes visible.

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Thanks for the feedback! I'll discuss it with the R&D team.

One question, though... the Edit menu option should persist across restarts. Can you check to see if LabVIEW is able to write to the INI file on your system? Thanks!

[Christina_R]

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

How does this work when (hidden) controls overlap (shown controls)?

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When working with overlapping controls, you will probably want to turn off the visibility of hidden controls at edit-time.

[tst]

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@Christina_R wrote:

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One question, though... the Edit menu option should persist across restarts. Can you check to see if LabVIEW is able to write to the INI file on your system? Thanks!

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LV is able to write. I had the line HiddenControlsVisibleWhileEditing=True in the ini file, but when I ran LV and opened the VI I uploaded, the control is hidden and the menu item is "Show Hidden...".

I then went and changed something in the settings (the blink time) and closed LV. The blinkSpeed line was updated with the new value, but the HiddenControlsVisibleWhileEditing line disappeared from the INI file.

It looks like this happens even when I don't change settings. Here's a timeline from now of actions I took and the value of the line in the INI file after taking the action. A hyphen means the line wasn't in the file:

Action	Line in INI	Hidden control is actually visible?	Menu item
	-
Open LV	-
Close LV	-
Open LV	-
Open the VI	-	No	Show
Close the VI	-
Close LV	-
Open LV	-
Open the VI	-
Change to show	-	Yes	Hide
Close the VI	-
Close LV	True
Open LV	True
Close LV	-
Open LV	-
Open the VI	-		Show
Change to show	-	Yes	Hide
Close the VI	-
Close LV	True
Open LV	True
Open the VI	True	No	Show

[wiebe@CARYA]

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@Christina_R wrote:

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wiebe@CARYA wrote:

How does this work when (hidden) controls overlap (shown controls)?

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When working with overlapping controls, you will probably want to turn off the visibility of hidden controls at edit-time.

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🌴🙂 (palmface).

Yes, that would work. I guess move to front, move to back (CTRL+SHIFT+K\J) would work too.

[Christina_R]

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@tst wrote:

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@Christina_R wrote:

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One question, though... the Edit menu option should persist across restarts. Can you check to see if LabVIEW is able to write to the INI file on your system? Thanks!

---

LV is able to write. I had the line HiddenControlsVisibleWhileEditing=True in the ini file, but when I ran LV and opened the VI I uploaded, the control is hidden and the menu item is "Show Hidden...".

[...]

Thank you for the detailed report of the issue! The dev team believes this has been fixed for the release.

[MadMark666]

Hello.

What we really need is a layer approach, the ability to have a common layer which is always shown  and then add other layers, during editing we could just show the layer we want to edit. This would also solve the overlapping controls issue mentioned below.

when running we could then display the layer we want to display to the user which may change bit like how the visible property works now, layer 1, 2,3 etc. The common would always be displayed, much nicer way of configuring the display for different uses but you still need some common things displayed at run time.