[LabVIEW Bug/Feature Report] Classic Color Ramp

[X.]

The Classic Color Ramp is a unique object:

It appears like this on the BD: 

It can be used to mimic the color ramp displayed with Intensity Chart or Graphs, or anywhere where you want to display a correspondance between numeric values and color (for instance with the Vision Toolkit, which suprisingly doesn't have such a feature associated with its Image Display control).

The problem is, this is a VERY OLD control and probably for this reason doesn't behave very well.

For instance, try to format the numeric range display of this color ramp to SI:

which looks like this on the BD:

To do this, you would go to the Properties page for this control (or right-click on it and select Display Format) and choose something like SI notation:

The result is disapointingly, nothing.

Old objects such as the Classic Slide react perfectly fine to this request:

In fact, you have to use a BD property node to achieve that effect with the Color Ramp:

leading to:

If you try to only show the color ramp but not the ticks and their numeric values, the natural choice would be to choose the following option:

Yet, the result is as follows:

in other words, the color ramp is gone with the scale... Not very useful.

Of course, you can customize the control and paint the ticks transparent so that this choice:

gives this after some manipulations (BTW, the big color box to the right can only be hidden while customizing the control and shrinking it to a single pixel):

What about the tiny "out of range" boxes above and below the ramp? Well, I did not find anyway to resize them in the customization window.

The only option seems to replace them by color boxes:

In conclusion, there appears to be quite a few quirks with this control.

I guess my favorite is the Data Type property page:

Not very helpful. Luckily, the type can be changed on the diagram:

resulting in:

Of course all this is no news for many old timers, but maybe it is time to fix these features/bugs?

[Mythilt]

You might want to post this to the NI LabVIEW Idea Exchange?

It is a good fit for that forum, and I think more likely to be seen by R&D there.

And then after posting, I see who posted it, and not like I'm letting a new user know that.

[Ben]

Hi Xavier,

In more modern version of LV it is sometimes possible to replace elements of a control IF the data type is an exact match.

Example:

An index control can be replaced by a scroll bar provided the scroll bar is the same data type.

Not that this information will nulify anything you said above. Just trying to share knowlege.

Ben

[X.]

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@Mythilt wrote:

You might want to post this to the NI LabVIEW Idea Exchange?

It is a good fit for that forum, and I think more likely to be seen by R&D there.

And then after posting, I see who posted it, and not like I'm letting a new user know that.

---

Once I have enough feedback, I will contact NI support and redirect them to this thread. They might issue a CAR, in which case I will post it.

No need to pollute the IE with bug reports if they are acknowledged by NI. Now if they claim these are intended features of the color ramp, I may go to the IE...

[X.]

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@Ben wrote:

In more modern version of LV it is sometimes possible to replace elements of a control IF the data type is an exact match.

Example:

An index control can be replaced by a scroll bar provided the scroll bar is the same data type.

---

That's what I illustrated with the color box replacement above, I believe. This would be a nice nugget to write, if you had time for it, with a few examples of the kind you give above.

[X.]

Another couple of really annoying features of the Color Ramp are:

- the context menu doesn't have the standard "Copy Data", "Description & Tips", "Reinitalize to Default" items which most other objects in LabVIEW offer.

- as a side effect, it is impossible to copy the color ramp at run time (e.g. to paste it as an image in a Word document).

[Bob_Schor]

Is it possible that the Color Ramp (which, as you mention, is found only on the Classic Front Panel, and is "very old") is a form of "NI Abandonware", something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but had flaws that seemed either difficult to fix or not useful enough to fix?  I know NI is very reluctant to "drop" less-useful ideas, so coming up with a "more useful" idea for a Color Ramp and its implementation might be a useful project, particularly if there were a reasonable path from "Color Ramp 1" to "Color Ramp 2" (I'm thinking of the sudden appearance of AVI2 functions in the Vision palettes, and the Delimited Spreadsheet functions replacing Spreadsheet File function in LabVIEW 2015).

Bob Schor

[X.]

The Color Ramp is definitely in need of some revamping, be it only to give it an horizontal equivalent.

Another feature of the context menu is that you cannot "replace" this Control by anything. That menu item is just not available, like many standard others (Visible Items, etc):

Compare this to the Numeric context menu (which is pretty characteristic of a lot of other controls):

[X.]

Yet another example of something that could be improved in the Color Ramp.

Most people will want to use the "Interpolate Color" option, which does exactly what it says.

Provide this color array to the ramp:

and it will display this:

Notice that the 3 colors are present, albeit only at the extreme values for the first and last color.

Now, uncheck the "Interpolate Color" option and observe this:

The first color of the array is used, but the last is not.

I would argue that the desired behavior would be this:

I have illustrated these features in the attached VI.

[RavensFan]

Can you attach it as LV 15 or older.

LV 16 just came out a few weeks ago, not everyone has gotten their discs or downloaded it yet.

I'm wondering if you add a 4th color to the ramp if your non-interpolate color one would show as 3 colors between 0 and 2.