Visibility

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Visibility

YouTube_icon Tutorial video about visibility

 

 

Example projects: Download this example to see how Visibility is used.

 

There are several reasons for using Visibility.

The Visibility can be used...

to hide symbols or information on the device, until for example an error occurs.

in case you would like to use the same project for different systems (for example, for machines with different equipment).

to define different work flows depending on the access rights. For example a normal user view and an admin user view. So you can hide/show buttons or pages for specific user groups.

 

New simplification of the Visibility system

 

The Visibility system has been extended to make things easier. Now every variable can be used as a visibility variable for objects.

 

To do this, drag & drop a variable from the Variable View onto the object. In the context menu, select the object first, and in the second level, select "Use as Visibility variable".

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This activates the property Visibility for the object and sets the variable as the Visibility variable for the object.

 

Alternatively, the Visibility variable can be set through the properties.

Select the object and activate Visibility in the properties.

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Then open the Visibility dialog by pressing the three-dot button in the Visibility Bit property.

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First, check the check box next to "Select Variable". Then choose a variable below by filtering by owner and/or group. After choosing the variable you want to use, click OK to save the setting. The variable will be displayed in the Visibility Bit property.

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Setting the object visible / invisible is very easy:

 

If the variable is 0, the object is invisible

If the variable has ANY other value than that, the object is visible.

 

If variables are initialized as invalid, their default value will be used to determine the visibility status, i.e. if a variable is configured to be initialized as invalid and with default value 5, the according object will still be visible, even when the variable has not been set to a valid value.

 

Note that a variable can be used for several objects, i.e. one variable can make any number of objects visible / invisible at the same time.

Note that String variables cannot be used as visibility variables. Any other data type that is offered can be used.

Also note that the pre-defined Visibility variables (see below) can't be used for the new visibility system.

 

Alternatively to the new system described above, Visibility variables are provided by the program. Every project contains a set of 64 Visibility variables. All of them have 16 Visibility bits, which can be assigned to any graphical object(s). Each bit is a flag to hide or show graphical objects by switching between the value 0 or 1.

The value range of the Visibility variables is from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF. The default value is set to 0xFFFF, which means that all corresponding object will be visible.

hmtoggle_plus1How to configure Visibility
hmtoggle_plus1Structure of Visibility Variables
hmtoggle_plus1Use Visibility Variables in the Project