The ability to set an image as a background or wallpaper would be nice so you could drag items onto a map without the item trying to “bind” to the image. Wonderware has this feature I believe.
thanks!
You mean like the Container component’s Texture property?
yeah I guess that would work similar.
On a side note, the container doesn’t work when you drag items that are already in the window into the container. It only works when new items are dragged into the container.
That is by design so you don’t move things around in the hierarchy unexpectedly. There should probably be some sort of alt-drop type of modifier that would let you move it into the target container. Currently the way to do this is cut-and-paste.
Quick question about using the texture property. If I set a background image, will it resize on a different resolution, or will part of the image be lost? Thanks.
It “tiles” the image at its native resolution. So if you have a larger area, it will repeat. If you have a smaller area, it will be cropped.
If you don’t like this, just use the Image component. You can always push the image component to the back and cover it with a large, transparent container, and you’ll never even know the image is there as you’re designing your window.
Since this is a feature request section, I am making the request for a “Convert to wallpaper”. This would be easier than texturing an image and then putting a clear container over it.
ok…and what would that do?
it’s just faster and more intuitive I think. I did this a lot with my RSView projects. I would put a map of the conveyor as a wallpaper and then put all of the devices, buttons, etc on top of that.
I’m not asking why you want “convert to wallpaper” - I’m asking you to describe what it even means, specifically. Is it like the texture property, but it stretches instead of tiles? Does it center? does it maintain aspect ratio if it stretches? is it something else entirely?
In RSView you import an image. Then you can stretch it to fit your screen (by stretching it you can change the aspect ratio) and position it any place you want. You can also import another image if you want. You then arrange how your background would be like by moving and stretching those two images. Then you control select those two images and “Convert to wallpaper”. It places those images in the background and you don’t have to worry about accidently moving them or messing them up.
If you wanted to change the wallpaper you can “Unlock all wallpaper”. Actually I just checked and it not only works with images, but with anything, including buttons. But when you “Convert to wallpaper” all buttons and things lose their functionality.
Carl,
Bryan can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what he is looking for would basically be to use the texture property, but be able to set it so the image will stretch to fit the window. That’s what I was asking about earlier, as a couple of HMI packages I’ve used before had that feature.
Joe
yeah being able to stretch the image is part of it. But there are some other benefits of having “convert to wallpaper” which I’ve mentioned above.
Ok, I get it.
Since there is a perfectly good way to currently do this with the overlaid-container, there isn’t too much motivation for this compared to the mountain of high-priority features we’ve got, but it is duly noted.