I am trying to animate my tab strips based on any unacknowledged alarms. I already have the tags and scripting in place to correctly detect alarms for each area. I was able to do this with some global scripts and a UDT combined with some nasty OR statements. All of that functionality has been proven out at this point.
Where I am struggling is how to actually color the tabs (flash red/yellow) if there is an alarm in a certain zone (i.e. tab). I don’t see any method for doing this in the “Tab Strip Customizer”. I thought maybe there would be some way to do this in the “Style Customizer”, but it seems like any style I create is going to be applied to the entire strip. I have thought of a really hacky solution using additional vector objects, but I will only do this if I have no other choice.
Thanks for reading this and in advance for anyone that is gracious enough to assist.
Thanks. I’m OK with making incremental progress. The hard part of detecting alarms per zone is all programmed in. If I am just going to modify the tab dataset, I do not see a way to animate any colors. If that’s the case, I’ll start off with changing the color of a given tab/zone to a red background.
My thinking is… You will use some scripting to take the alarm status, etc. of each zone, and convert that to a color. Then, using Cell Update bindings you can change the background color an individual tab.
You may have to use a middle component, or a hidden custom property, to do the conversion between an alarm status, and the color it represents.
Currently, I am trying to figure out how to change the color using a cell binding. I’m not sure what sort of data it is expecting!
It looks like a it’s a datatype object of “clr”. I did a basic test using the cell update function with this data:
color(238,236,232,255)
The dataset appeared to update, so I think I can make some progress on coloring the tabs a solid color. I agree that using some intermediary tags are likely the way to go. In terms of actually doing some animation to flash the colors, I might be able to do that using client timers, but I’m not too confident in their ability to toggle consistently (I haven’t used them much so a large portion of that is fear of the unknown).
Take a look at this… It is crude, and simple, but maybe it’ll give you an idea of what to do. I am by no means an expert! There should be comments in a text area, and more in the scripting.
Has anyone noticed that if using animation/blink on a tab Ignition will slow down over time? Using Stuarts app as a test, I ran it and changing windows was fast, but would slow considerably over just a few minutes. I noticed this when I added animation to a tab strip style. CPU usage would rise a bunch as well.
