Vision Designer Interface

Component Palette

The Vision module comes with a host of useful components out of the box, such as buttons, text areas, dropdowns, charts, many of which are specialized for industrial controls use.  The Component Palette is located on the right side of the Designer workspace. The basic workflow is to drag a component from the component palette and drop it into a container on a window. From there, you can use the mouse to drag and resize the component into the correct position. While the component is selected, you can use the Property Editor panel to alter the component's properties, which changes the component's appearance and behavior.

Vision Property Editor

The Vision Property Editor is a dockable panel that appears in the Designer's central workspace, usually in the lower left corner. It displays the properties of the selected component. If more than one component is selected, it will show all properties that the current selection set have in common. Hovering your mouse over a property will display a tooltip that gives a description of the property, as well as its data type and scripting name. Alternately, you can click on the Show/Hide Description Area icon to bring up the description area which displays the same information for the currently selected property.

You can also change how the properties are sorted in the property editor. By default, they are sorted with the Categorized  icon, with similar components grouped under different categorical headers. However, they can also be sorted in alphabetical order by clicking on the Alphabetic  icon.

Filters

It is common for components to have many properties, so by default the Property Editor only shows the Basic properties. These are the properties that you'll most commonly want to set or bind for a given component. However, the property filter can be changed to show different sets of properties. The designer will remember your selection for future sessions. 

• Basic: The Name property and any very commonly used properties. Most components only show two to four properties in Basic.
• Standard: Most of the common properties that a designer would want to use. Few or none of the Expert properties are in the Standard list.
• Expert: The properties that are most commonly used with more advanced features of the component. Few or none of the Standard properties are in the Expert list.
• All: All properties
  
  

Binding Icon

To the right of most properties is the Binding  icon. Click this icon to modify the property binding that is driving that property. You can only use this button when the window workspace is not in Preview mode. Some properties cannot be bound because their datatype is not supported by the binding system. You can still use scripting to affect these properties.

Status Indication

The name of a property in the Property Editor conveys important information about that property:

• A blue name indicates that the property is a custom property. 
• A bold name with a Link  icon next to the property indicates that the property is bound using a property binding. 
• A bold name with a Color Palette  icon indicates that the property is being affected by the component styles settings.
• A  red bold name with a Warning  icon indicates that the property is double-bound. This means that two things, a property binding and the styles settings are both trying to drive the property value. This will result in errors as the two systems fight each other to write to the property.

Dropdown Lists in Properties

Some of the properties you will encounter on components will have a dropdown list instead of a field to type into. The property description will say it is an integer value, and in most of these cases you can still create a binding on that property. These dropdown lists are an enumeration, meaning each element in the dropdown has an integer value. In all cases, the first value in the list is 0, the second is 1, the third is 2, and so on. You can use this knowledge to create a dropdown list on-screen for your operators that matches the list. In this case, you would just bind this property to the Selected Value of the dropdown.

Common Properties

Every component has properties arranged into categories based on what it has available (i.e., Common, Behavior, Data, Appearance, Layout, etc.). Each component has a different list of properties to effect how it behaves, but every component has the Common group of properties located at the top of the list. These Common properties will behave the same for all components. Here's a list for each Common property and when it might be used.

Vision Menubar

There is a menubar at the top of the Designer Workspace that provides functionality when working in the Vision workspace. Each menu dropdown reveals a host of functions related to the menu item. The other menus shared between Vision and Perspective are discussed in the General Designer Interface.

File Menu

See General Designer Interface. 

Edit Menu

The Edit Menu is similar to other applications edit menus as it provides much of the basic copy/paste functionality. You can also access this menu by right-clicking on an item.

View Menu

The View Menu allows you to manipulate how various objects look or act in the Designer.

Project Menu

The Project Menu is where many project specific settings can be changed.

Component Menu

The Component Menu offers many of the same selections for the selected component that right clicking on that component would contain.

Alignment Menu

The Alignment Menu options allow you to adjust the alignment of components relative to other components.

Shape Menu

The Shape Menu allows for manipulation of shape or path objects.

Tools Menu

The Designer comes with many tools that allow you to manage and test various resources within a project. Each of the tools have their own interface and are accessed within the Tools menu on the menu bar of the Designer. For more information, see Designer Tools.