Basic Design Question - Window Layout

Trying to settle on a window arrangement - say I have 10 tabs (Factories) on the North dock and each tab opens a window with 10 further screen buttons (OEE, Energy, SCADA etc) and each of these has 10 further screens (Daily, Weekly, Monthly etc) , basically I may want hundreds of screens …

  1. First - I went with multiple containers and hid/displayed using the visibility tag - are the screens that are not visible “active” and taking resources? I copied this idea from the Inductive diary example (Administration page) but what if there was xx trend screens in the background (invisible) not just “static” screens, I could end up with perhaps 30 odd invisible containers.
  2. Should I go with 10 projects, 1 for each factory (all running on 1 server)
  3. I am currently trying out the treeview in a docked west window, but I guess I have to have 10 docked windows, only one open at a time to show the selected factory’s options. The tree structure allows the drilling down to sub levels within 1 container.

Option 1 looks nice in practise but i’m wondering if having invisible trends etc in the background is bad practise. I know there is an example for screen navigation on the Inductive site but I see this as very limited in the amount of screens available. Can anyone advise on the best method when your screen navigation on paper ressembles a “family tree”? Should I get rid of the north dock and have just the west dock drilling down from top to bottom of all screens???

You don’t want to use approach 1. Everything on a window is active and running even though it is not visible. So if you had 30 trends they would all query the db even though some are invisible.

I like the tree view approach. You can have one docked west window and you can break up all navigation in a nice hierarchy. The tree view components data is just a dataset property that can be static or you can bind it to something. Let’s say you put all of your hierarchy in the database you can alter the tree view on the fly and add elements without having to go into the designer.

Another approach is having one docked north window with multiple layers of tab strips. Your first tab strip shows each factory. That tab strip’s navigation mode is set to disabled. When you do that it won’t automatically swap windows but will alter a selectedTab property whenever a tab is selected. With that you can have another tab strip right below that is for OEE, Energy, SCADA, etc that is only visible when the right tab from the first tab strip is selected. The very bottom tab strip can actually swap windows.

Let us know if you have more questions.

Tables->“Tree view component” question:

Is it possible to have Selected (orange background color by default) more than one item?
Is it possible to have Selected (orange backgrounded) only those tree items which have their respective windows opened?
In other words after closing the window which belongs to one of the Tree view component dataset lines, the respective item orange background color would disappear?

So that:

  • no windows from the tree is opened = no selected items in the tree,
  • there is e.g. five windows opened from the tree = five selected (orange backgrounded) tree items.

You can select more than one object in the tree view component by changing the ‘Selection Mode’ property to either of the ‘Multiple’ options.

You would need to have a python script to change the selection of the Tree View component. It has setSelectedPath(String) and setSelectedItem(int) functions that you can call, but there is no way to set a multiple selection.

A much easier way to achieve the same effect would be to change the underlying dataset in the component. You could make the window names bold, or change the background color, or something like that.