You have probably been in this situation before: you have a bunch of classes in your project with configuration data and you want to be able to edit them in the UI and store them on disk, but they don’t all have a common ancestor. Maybe some of them are Actors and others are not. The natural solution is to use interfaces, and now LabVIEW has them. This article will show how to use a “Configurable” interface that’s applicable to Actors and non-Actors, handles UI and disk, and works great with tiered configuration where parts of some classes’ configuration are stored in an abstract parent and other parts are in various children.

The MGI Panel Manager is built to work especially well with the Actor Framework. The Actor Framework handles all of the inter-process commuincation while the MGI Panel Manager handles all of the displaying.

The Panel Manager packages already contains all of the classes you need to easily get started.

A quick description of the new and improved MGI monitored actor.

Getting started with the Actor Framework can seem like a daunting task. Understanding the basics is the first step in getting going in the world of actors.

In Part 1 we discussed the Queued Message Handler (QMH) and the Object Oriented (OO) QMH. The OO QMH seemed pretty sweet, but it was a lot of code just to get going. Now we’ll see how the Actor Framework can help us.

Now that we understand the concepts and building blocks of the Actor Framework, lets learn how to actually run some code.

So we now know that Actors are really just object oriented Queued Message Handlers, and we know how to start the message handling loop of the actor and how to message that loop. Now we need to know how to actually get cool stuff done using actors.

A simple example that shows you how to build a basic Actor Framework based file logger.

Messages in the actor framework have a lot of boiler plate code. The built in message maker helps, but has room for improvement. The MGI Actor Framework Message Maker easily builds your actor message classes, but also:

• Increases code readability with better icons
• Retains message VI Documentation
• Has the ability to update messages after code changes

See how you can use the MGI Monitored Actor Toolkit to get a live view of the actors currently running in your application