"Description and Tip" for Tab Control not working

[Edjsch]

Hi,

Has anyone seen (or can duplicate) the following behavior?

Right-clicking on a tab of a Tab Control should bring up "Description and Tip...", then right or left clicking that text brings up the Description and Tip dialog box. However, this does not work when the vi is running (it does work in the development environment when the vi is not running, allowing me to create the description and tip). I'm running version 8.5 on Windows XP.

Furthermore, on the development PC, the pop-up Tip (of the "Description and Tip") for the Tab Control appears at the top of screen well above my normalized window, not near the tab near where the mouse is hovering (as it should be and is for all other controls). This is also true of a built stand-alone executable. However, when the exe is launched on another PC (which already has the run-time software installed, of course), neither a Tip nor the right-click context menu appears at all.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

Ed S.

[Edjsch]

UPDATE: I was mistaken about this: When deployed to another XP PC, the behavior is the same as on the development computer. That is, the tip appears at the top of the screen, well above my window with the tab control. However, the right-click context menu (with the full description dialog) is missing, the same as on the development PC. On a Windows 7 PC, the tip does not appear at all.

More information: I see that for each tab in my tab control, the context item Advanced --> Run Time Shortcut Menu is disabled. It does not get enabled even when I edit it to create a custom Description and Tip item, as I have done successfully for other controls.

Ed S.

[Edjsch]

ANOTHER UPDATE: Now the tip is appearing on the Win 7 PC, at the top as in the XP PC's. But still no Description context dialog box.

[Edjsch]

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: When I pop a tab control into a new vi, it works properly. I've gone through comparing all the properties and settings and do not see any differences between the new tab control and the one in my application. Does anyone have any ideas as to what is causing this behavior? Thanks.

Ed

[Kristoff2]

Edjsch,

I know there were some issues with the Description and Tip popup in older version of labview but there are not current outstanding issues.  If you are able to find a way to reproduce the issue I can try to recreate it in house, however I was unable to find any problems in LabVIEW 2010 on Windows 7.

Regards,

Sam Kristoff

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[Edjsch]

Sam,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Unfortunately I cannot recreate the problem because, as I said, when I place a tab control in a new vi, it works as advertised. It works (I'm guessing) because the Advanced --> Run-Time Shortcut Menu --> Disable item is NOT checked. In my existing application where I wanted to add descriptions and tips, the Disable item is checked, and remains checked even when I edit it and save it (with the control). I even tried copying and pasting my problematic tab control into the new vi, but Disable remains checked. (As I said, even though it's disabled, the tip does pop up at the top of the monitor, but the description doesn't appear at all.)

So I guess somewhere along the way maybe my tab control got corrupted? Please let me know if you have any other ideas.

Thanks,

Ed

[Edjsch]

I was trying to add this after my post, but my edit time expired:

I was wondering if maybe somewhere along the way my tab control got corrupted, so I tried an early, archived version from almost 3 years ago (initially developed with version 8.2), and it has the same issue, so I'd doubt it's a corruption problem.

Also the problem persists even if I save the rtm to a file instead of with the control. And if I open the new, good rtm file for my tab control's rtm, it is still disabled.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas.

Thanks,

Ed

[Kristoff2]

Edjsch,

Can you post the code so we can see if this happens on other machines and in other versions of LabVIEW as well?

Thanks,

Sam K

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[Edjsch]

Sam,

Thanks for your offer. In preparing a sample vi for you (where I copied the tab control in question to and deleted all the controls in each tab), I discovered the main problem: The Advanced --> Run-Time Shortcut Menu --> Disable item is checked (as I mentioned previously), and all I needed to do was to click it to uncheck it! Dumb. I thought I tried that, but I guess I did not. (And for some brain-freeze reason I thought that by editing the item it would uncheck it, but they are 2 separate properties, of course. One the actual text, and the other the enable/disable property.)

Now there is one minor issue remaining: The tip is displayed about 2" above the tab instead of just above it. I've attached 2 vi's. One (Tab Control Test Original.vi) has both my original tab control and another, new, tab control above it. Both display the Tip about 2" above the tab. (Previously I said that that tip was at the top of the screen. This is because my vi is large and takes up almost the whole screen.) The other vi (Tab Control Test New.vi) has just the one, new tab control, and it displays the tip just above the tab, as it should. Do you see this behavior? Do you have any ideas as to what is causing this?

Thanks,

Ed

[Edjsch]

Sam,

There's another issue I noticed. Now that the RTM is enabled, the tip does appear (it always did, even when disabled - leaving the tip text blank is the only way to suppress the tip pop up). However, the right-click RTM Description and Tip pop-up box is for the entire tab control, not for the individual tabs! This can be seen on the example vi's I attached previously.

Is there a way to display the Description and Tip pop-up for each individual tab? (This ability is available and does pop up correctly at design time, when the vi is not running.)

Ed