I would like to be able to bind the Client Background Color in the Project Properties under Client/User Interface. Also, the tab strip colors can’t be bound in the tab strip customizer. If you have selectable color schemes, there is no way to change these colors programatically. This is all I’ve come across so far, but if there are others, please add them to this wish list also.
Have you looked at the Property Editor > Data > Tab Data?
No Pat, I didn’t. I wasn’t aware that there was a Tab Data in the properties as I had been using the Tab Strip Customizer to change the colors manually, and for some reason I thought that was where they would need to be changed. Thank you sir for bringing that to my attention.
The project background color is not as big a deal as this was. We are building this project for multiple users on different computers with different screen resolutions, and the project background color shows on some screens. For now, I have it set to black, but it would be nice if it could be set programatically to the same as the background color of the different windows.
Most (all?) of the components that you use the Customizer on is actually editing a dataset that is used by that component. You’ll need to select All or Expert under the Property Editor > Filter properties to find them. Use the Customizer to set the look/feel of a component, from there find the dataset and work with it to make dynamic changes.
The project background showing up on different screen resolutions can be alleviated by setting your windows to Start Maximized (except for popups and such), that way it’ll always fill the available screen, no project background color to see.
I’m guessing you tried that and you found that your components didn’t look like you wanted them to on different screen resolutions. This is where you start playing with the Component Layout to get what you want. I always try to work with my components set to Relative layout first because it’s the least amount of work. There are times when you need to have your components in a exact location, for that you use Anchored layout. Now maybe you’ve tried Anchored layout and you’ve found another issue, all your components are in the top left of the window and on wide monitors it looks silly, you’d rather have them centered on the screen. Here’s a tip, when you need to use Anchored layout for a window, place a container on the window and place all your components in the container, set the container to Anchored top/center and then everything will be centered in the window.
Again, thanks for the helpful tips, Pat. It is appreciated.
I always set properties to ‘All’, which brings up another thing I would like to see in Ignition. That would be designer user settings that would be retained between sessions. I would think there are already some settings retained, but that is one I would add, if possible. I simply missed the Tab Data property on the tab strip. As I said, I was using the customizer to set colors, so I just assumed that was where it would be done. I will keep a closer eye out for those datasets in the future, thanks to your reminder.
As for the layout, I tried the maximized windows, and did not like what it did to the contents of the windows at all. We picked a minimum size window that should be no larger than any current laptop screen, and built everything to fit that. Everything is anchored north and west and stays where I put it. I definitely like your idea on the inner container though and will experiment with that. I know there are numerous ways to do this, and we will probably try more than one method before finding the best way for our project. The beauty of it is the flexibility to use whatever suits your fancy.
If I were building this for, let’s say, a plant control system, where there are one or more clients with the same size screen on each client, it would be simple to build the project for that particular screen size, such that it will always look the same and would use all the screen real estate possible. Unfortunately, we will have multiple clients, using whatever computer system they are given, and screen size can vary greatly.