TP4 Grouping

jason_the_adams

Hello to all,

Working on various panels, I began to wish the popup grouping within TP Design had a bit more capability, and moreover, a stronger organizational purpose. On small designs, it's no problem; however on larger and more complicated panels I would have liked to be able to group popups without making them necessarily mutually exclusive. Also, it would perhaps be a plus to have more control over the mutually exclusive properties of grouping (I.E. three popups in the group and 1,3 are exclusive; 2,1 are excluseive; 2,3 are not.)

I did already discuss this possibility with the head-programmer I work with and he wasn't nearly as keen on the idea as I was; from a programming standpoint he was definitly right; from a designers standpoint, I knew at the very least methods of organization is a pleasant capability to have. Furthermore I know that too much capability on the panel's side would be a problem during connectivity timeouts, in which case the previously requested time-out message in the panels would be nice.

All in all though, I think it's most likely I'm just being anal about organization. I don't think my idea is perfect, but I do wonder if anyone else has had any thoughts about this; perhaps more refined than mine?

DHawthorne

I can live with the current arrangement; I've gotten used to working with it. But I can see your point as well. Back-in-the-day, it was not uncommon to have one page or popup for a device, and that was that. Now, it's not unusual to have half a dozen, and sometimes quite a few more. I find myself making groups labeled things like: <source> Main, <source> Ancillary, <source> Tertiary, etc., all because of the undesired exclusivity of the current group system. I've also found myself looking through a panel, and finding residual popups from devices that were changed out long ago, but I missed them because they had to be grouped differently from the others.

I would not object to there being two independent group types: one that functions strictly as a label and forms a logical group; and another that determines priority and exclusivity.

ericmedley

I see your point as well.

I have sort of modified how I deal with the groupings on the panel design less from a 'system-function' stand point and more from a layout standpoint.

So my groups are typically something like 'Navigation' 'left popups' 'right popups' 'whole page popups' ...

as apposed to 'video routing popups' 'audio routing popups' 'HVAC popups' etc...

I then do the true management of the popups in the program. Inotherwords making sure that one popup is mutually exclusive or always inclusive with another.

As with all things like this... 'One size fits most but not all'