Control elements group "System" - do they belong to LabVIEW?

[MaSta]

Hello all!

In my projects I usually use control elements from group "Modern", but some from group "System" have a sleaker design, especially the numeric controls. There are basically two, one with and one without index.

The problem with them is, that even if you can activate the radix for the one with index, the radix wouldn't show. For the other one, you cannot activate an index. 

Means, they're as configurable as the modern control elements and I get the feeling they don't belong to LabVIEW, which the group name "System" may point to. What are they?

[tst · Accepted solution]

The system controls are supposed to take their appearance from the operating system (e.g. change your system colors or theme and see how that affects them) and are supposed to let you build applications that fit with the general look of the OS and the user settings.

That said, my understanding is that for all kinds of reasons (features which only exist in LV like the radix, the fact that controls in LV are built different from the system controls, etc.) NI doesn't actually use the native system directly, but rather had to basically recreate their appearance on their own. I'm guessing that whoever implemented the numeric control with the spinner (what LV refers to as "increment/decrement") didn't think of implementing the radix and whoever implemented the standard numeric control didn't include the option for the spinner, because in the OS native controls those are two separate controls.

If the functionality and appearance is important, I think I would try to overlay my own control for selecting the radix over the numeric spinner and use that to update its format string programmatically.