LabVIEW Web UI import from VI

[GuessWho]

Suggestion for developers of LabVIEW Web UI:

We would like our Web UI to have a very similar look-and-feel to the core application it is tied to.  To facilitate that, it would be useful to be able, in WebUI, to be able to point at a VI and say "import panel" - the tool would then import all sensible importable features of the VI's front panel, as a starting point.

Blair Smith

[GuessWho]

Suggestion for developers of LabVIEW Web UI:

We would like our Web UI to have a very similar look-and-feel to the core application it is tied to.  To facilitate that, it would be useful to be able, in WebUI, to be able to point at a VI and say "import panel" - the tool would then import all sensible importable features of the VI's front panel, as a starting point.

Blair Smith

[Mr.Mike]

This is something that NI has thought about. We completely agree you'd want to be able to open LabVIEW VIs in LabVIEW Web UI Builder. However, LabVIEW Web UI Builder is an early access product so it's focus is on providing a limited but stable set of functionality. Importing LabVIEW VIs will still require a lot of work.

While the two applications share the same data flow language, they are based on different control architectures. LabVIEW 2011 uses controls implemented specifically for LabVIEW. LabVIEW Web UI Builder uses controls that (although built to work well with our diagram) are native Silverlight controls. The first result of this is that the controls are a separate implementation and it is not complete. Many controls that exist in LabVIEW 2011 have simply not been built yet. Unimplemented controls include trees, tables, multicolumn listboxes, clusters and many types of graphs. Any of these controls could not be imported.

For the controls that do exist many still have limited or modified functionality. LabVIEW 2011 allows a lot more customization, including importing of images, that is not yet supported in LabVIEW Web UI Builder. In some cases we chose to leave existing functionality out for architectural reasons. For example LabVIEW Web UI Builder buttons do not support the latch until released mechanical action. We felt this was the least used mechanical action and leaving this out allowed us to make the interaction between the button and the diagram a cleaner architecture. (We do have a vision of what you would use instead but involves an event structure, which is also not implemented yet.)

Although this would not be an issue for importing the panel only, there are also changes to the properties available on the diagram for each control. We tried to balance matching desktop LabVIEW and matching Silverlight standards with an eye toward being able to support third-party Silverlight controls within LabVIEW Web UI Builder. This is shown in places like IsEnabled on a button being a boolean instead of a 3 state enum and the boolean Visibility property being gone in favor of a numeric Opacity.

These are just a few of the challenges in importing a VI from LabVIEW 2011 into LabVIEW Web UI Builder.

This is a good opportunity to get your input on such a conversion so we have an idea of what are customers are looking for. What would you be looking for when you import a VI into LabVIEW Web UI Builder? Complete compatibility? The exact same look? The same layout with similar shapes and sizes? The same behavior? How do you think choices in the import process should be handled (such as what to do with that missing mechanical action)?

Thank you for your feedback!

[Darren]

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