Change Properties of All Controls and Indicators Programmatically in LabVIEW

When creating an application with a user interface (UI), it is common for developers to seek a way to change the properties of multiple UI components at once, such as disabling all controls and indicators in the LabVIEW front panel.

This article will demonstrate how to disable and gray out all the controls and indicators with simple LabVIEW code.

1. Put several controls and indicators in the front panel. For this demonstration, numeric, string and boolean controls and indicators will be inserted into the front panel, to be used for property changing demonstration purposes.
2. In the block diagram, insert a VI Server Reference.
   
3. Connect the VI Server Reference to a property node.
4. Right-click the property node and select Select Property>>Front Panel. This will return a reference to the front panel of the VI.
   
5. Connect the front panel reference to a property node.
6. Right-click the property node and select Select Property>>Controls[]. This will return an array of references to all controls and indicators added to the front panel.
   
7. Connect the controls and indicators references to a For loop structure with an auto-indexing tunnel so processing for each references is possible.
8. Connect the output of the auto-indexing tunnel to a property node.
9. Right-click the property node and select Select Property>>Disabled. This will allow users to programmatically disable and gray out the control or indicator of the provided reference.
10. Create a constant for the Disabled property. For this demonstration, I will select Disabled and Grayed Out.
    
11. Wire all the error terminals and close the references accordingly.
    
    Note: This image is a LabVIEW snippet, which includes LabVIEW code that you can reuse in your project. To use a snippet, right-click the image, save it to your computer, and drag the file onto your LabVIEW diagram.  
12. After running this code, observed that all the controls and indicators will be disabled and grayed out.