Coloring the border area only of Silver cluster controls programattically

[Spaz]

Is anyone aware of a property/hack to programatically color the outside edge of a Silver cluster?

I have several of the pictured clusters on a fp that displays data age/status for units.  Individual child control's values contained therein are individually updated and/or colored to indicate status information at a glance and varying boolean text is applied to indicate a unit's position in a synchronous backup satellite data queue.  I would like to color just the border area to indicate that a backup satellite data transmission is currently ongoing for a particular unit with less color contrasts than what I'm getting with the 'color' property:

I can color it individually in the development environment manually with the 'Set Color' tool, but I've had no luck with the color property or finding a suitable property or a usable reference to that portion of the control to get the job done.

The manual color picker window has BG and FG selections for both the cluster content area and it's 'border'.  The FG selection for the content area seemingly has no effect, but both FG and BG selection achieve desired effect when individually selected.

Am I missing something here?  Suggestions?

[Gregory]

I usually put a string control at the bottom of the front panel to display the "status". I think this may be a more expected type of notification for the user, although it might be too subtle for what you want.

[OEM_Dev]

How about adding a boolean to the cluster like so...?

[paul_cardinale]

Sorry, it's just not accessible programmatically.  The same is true for the border of a classic cluster.

Each of the built-in LabVIEW properties has a unique 32-bit identifier.  If you know the code for a property, you can access it programmatically.  I once ran a program to conduct an exhaustive search of all 4,294,967,295 property codes, looking for one that would change the color of a classic cluster's border (it took about 3 days running in the background).  It came up dry.

[Spaz]

Thanx, but it is a complex status (hence the cluster) and it is asynchronous (hence a cluster for each unit).  With multiple units changing status quickly, it seems that a simple string would be overwritten with the latest status from the latest unit with a status change or you would have to scroll a text box. 

The idea is is to be able to glance at a screen area to the right of a large MC listbox (that itemizes more detailed and specific stats for a selected unit) to get a an overview of everything else that is going on for all units.  That part's done.  Lots of different colors and values changing quickly, etc.  The purpose of the frame area coloring would be to indicate which of several units that are queued up to perform the rather slow, synchronous 2400 baud data call in the event of fallback to satellite comms is actually in the process of collecting data.

I just think that the frame coloring is much more aesthetic than the example below it, especially since the still shots don't adequately portray the various colors of the child controls or the quantity of clusters with differing variations...

Thanx again.

[Gregory]

You could try tucking a boolean behind your cluster. Please see the example.

[Spaz]

Could, but rather not.  Doesn't hilite all the info and space is at a premium.   The boolean on the right enables satcom fallback for that particular unit and indicates it's position in the satcom queue via it's boolean text.  Right clicking it moves that unit to the front of the queue.  I could even color it different when its actually making a data connection, but then you have to look down to the various clustes to see which boolean is set true.  When only one status cluster of 11 has a different frame color, that's pretty quick to spot. Same for the third cluster in my pic, but that's plain ugly!

Thanx

[Spaz]

OK,  I thought I'd spent too long on this ...

Can't mark this as a solution, as I still hold out hope, BUT it definitely deserves a Kudo for tenacity!!!

Thanx.

[BowenM]

You could fake it with a decoration.

[Spaz]

I'm probably headed to something like that.  I was P.O.'d that I couldn't come up with a simple solution.  I'm already passing fp references to subVI's as as variant attributes.  What's a dozen more?

Thanx for your time!