Programmatically Take a Screenshot of the Front Panel in LabVIEW

Updated Jul 10, 2024

Reported In

Software

  • LabVIEW Full

Issue Details

I would like to take a screenshot of my front panel in LabVIEW programmatically.

Solution

There are multiple ways to take a screen capture of your front panel programmatically.

If you have the Report Generation Toolkit, you are easily able to take a screenshot of the LabVIEW Front Panel and have it automatically load the image to a new Microsoft Word Document.  You can perform this using Print VI Panel or Documentation.vi. Below is a snippet of printing the front panel using the Report Generation Toolkit.
You can also take a screenshot of a Front Panel Object or the Front Panel using Invoke Nodes.  You can use the Get Image Invoke Nodes for either the Front Panel in relationship to the VI or a specific object.  This method does use the Graphics Format functions to save the screenshot as a picture file.
For more information on saving and printing the Front Panel in LabVIEW, see the related links section.

Additional Information

  • You can take a screenshot and include additional VI Information with Print VI Panel or Documentation VI, such as icons, descriptions, and block diagram.
  • This method only works in development mode, as the LabVIEW Runtime can't get the VI content from a compiled VI.