I need to create a grid of templates to represent a physical configuration of heating elements in a number of large furnaces. The element layout is rectangular in a x by y grid.
I can get what I need using the template repeater "layout style" set to "flow" then adjusting the size of the template until I get the desired grid. However, if I run the client on anything that has a different screen ratio than my designer setup the grid size is unpredictable.
I have played around with anchoring layouts to the upper left and top corner rather than relative mode and it might work out, but it is difficult to test. I was wondering if there was a better way to do this. I did not see a grid template container.
The other option I have considered is manually laying them out one at a time. But I have several of these with various grid dimensions and I would rather have a faster way to do this. I suppose I could do it in a table if I am displaying just data but there is a possibility I will display fault icons, complex color combinations and other things which is much easier to do with a template.
Example of element layout with temperature values being shown correctly. The blue squares are the templates.
That's not exactly correct, but I agree that the scaling of templates does not always work as expected. The template canvas offers some custom layout options and explicit control over positioning and size, but you will still have to relate that to your screen resolution in some way. One trick that I've used sparingly is to put a path based vision shape [a square or rectangle] somewhere in the window. This will give you both explicit bounds [x,y, width, height] and relative bounds [relX, relY, relWidth, relHeight] which you can use to ratio out size and dimension calculations. For custom scaling within the template itself, you must remember that a template scales relative to the template editor in the designer and not the window editor within the designer. See this post for more details on that.
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I really appreciate the feedback. I missed the x and y position properties. So far this looks like this will solve my problem although it is laborious to assign the positions for large matrices. I came up with some scripting to create a data set that can be pasted into the dataset property that stores the template canvas configuration and it saved me some time.
Thanks for detailed reply ! This helps in my fundamental understanding of scaling and possible ways to fix things in the future.