A secret Remote Desktop setting to overcome scaling and other issues
One of our customers reported a problem after connecting to a virtual machine via Remote Desktop to use Business Architect. They revealed that depending on the laptop they used, the Select Fields window in a Popup Element Creator or Editor was missing checkboxes, and users were unable to interact with them (logged as IN:12426). In the image below, you can see the row is very compact, and Show Description, Read Only and Custom Name are missing checkboxes.
We discovered this only happened when scaling (in the Display Settings of a monitor) was set to 150% or above. This lead to the following solutions:
- Ensure that the monitor showing the remote desktop session is set to 100% or 125% font scaling.
- When using all screens in a remote desktop session, the main monitor needs to be set to 100% or 125% scaling
However, these are intrusive and fiddly solutions. With the help of the wider community, we discovered a hidden, undocumented flag in the command line of the remote desktop app that disables the automatic DPI awareness. When running this command line to launch the remote desktop tool, the application was then usable, the checkboxes returned.
- Go to your start menu where it says "Type here to search" and enter
- mstsc /dpiunaware
- connect to the computer where you were experiencing problems.
- You may have to sign out of the remote computer and sign back in - rather than just disconnect/reconnect.
This may be useful for other applications you are experiencing problems with.
As for IN:12426 - we have fixed this in future MooD releases - by allowing the rows in the Select Fields window to resize dynamically based on their content, so that the checkboxes have room to render - and thus be usable and less cramped.
An unexpected discovery was that when looking at the Windows Version of the remote machine (using winver), it reported differently depending on whether the /dpiunaware flag was being used. Reporting "Windows Server 2016" when unaware or "Hyper-V Server 2016" when aware.
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