5 Ignition 8.1 Perspective Features Integrators should be using

Improve your Ignition Perspective development skills with 5 simple tips:

Wrap-in Container (Breakpoint, coordinate, or flex) and you will immediately have a new container (within the current container) with all selected components moved underneath the scope of the new container. "]]],[1,"p",[[0,[],0,"While not a huge, major feature add, this little design trick has saved me a lot of time in the designer!"]]],[1,"p",[[0,[],0,"5.) "],[0,[0],1,"Modify Source View"]]],[1,"p",[[0,[],0,"Ever come across an Embedded View instance and needed to change the design of the Root View that it is associated with, only to find out you needed to navigate through 4 subfolders to get to the root view in the Perspective Views tree?"]]],[1,"p",[[0,[],0,"As of Ignition 8.1.6, you can now simply right-click a given Embedded View and select "],[0,[0],1,"'Modify Source View'"],[0,[],0,". You will instantly both open up and be focused on the Source View for the given Embedded View in the designer and can make your changes. A small feature? Yes, but the little time-savers can add up and provide big savings on your next project!"]]]]}'>

1.) Perspective Pipes

Released in 8.1.12, Pipes exists as an additional drawing layer inside of a Perspective Coordinate Container.  While you can probably generate P&ID graphics faster by vectorizing and importing complete graphics via a separate SVG vectorizing program, Pipes is still a speedy no-hassle method for drawing pipe graphics that is fluid and has anchor points that can scale between resolutions effectively (depending on how you layout your Views!) . Pipes is a welcome, versatile addition to help solve a common HMI/UI Graphics Design issue.  The arrow styling features are an additional favorite tip of mine to show general process flow direction.

Protip: Make sure to import your P&ID as an image into your View first, set the opacity to 0.5, and now, trace your Perspective pipes layer over the P&ID image for quick and speedy design!

2.) Equipment Schedule

The Equipment Schedule is a favorite from the Vision component library, updated in 8.1 and now available as a native Perspective component.  We love using the Equipment Schedule for Maintenance/ops schedules and OEE Downtime Overviews (though there are certainly many more possibilities!).

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3.) Perspective Tooltips

What used to a tedious but not impossible task of positioning Popup Windows via Vision templates in popup windows (or just popup windows) as user tooltips has now become a simple (whether you have frontend experience or not) task of configuring a built-in meta property for any Perspective Component.

Perspective Tooltips can be automatically enabled on mouse hover, triggered via script (via any type of normal event customization, including messageHandlers and properties), and have their appearance delayed or elongated via customizable properties.

Tooltips are useful for all kinds of UIs, in particular, for custom form validation inside of Perspective.  Having quick, bindable access to tooltips can make anyone feel like a UI pro with little additional work.

Our favorite, simplest implementation for repeatable, easy tooltips is to create two property bindings in the Meta section of your Embedded View or Component:

• First, on the enabled property:
• Second, directly on the 'text' property of the tooltip

4.) Wrap-In Container

When trying to decide the best way to layout a particular Perspective view, sometimes you need to quickly move sets of components into a container.  Normally, you would have to create the desired container, copy/cut or click drag while having the desired container deep-selected.

Wrap-In Container shortcuts this entire process by allowing you to select any number of components inside of a view and simply right-click -> Wrap-in Container (Breakpoint, coordinate, or flex) and you will immediately have a new container (within the current container) with all selected components moved underneath the scope of the new container.

While not a huge, major feature add, this little design trick has saved me a lot of time in the designer!

5.) Modify Source View

Ever come across an Embedded View instance and needed to change the design of the Root View that it is associated with, only to find out you needed to navigate through 4 subfolders to get to the root view in the Perspective Views tree?

As of Ignition 8.1.6, you can now simply right-click a given Embedded View and select 'Modify Source View'. You will instantly both open up and be focused on the Source View for the given Embedded View in the designer and can make your changes. A small feature? Yes, but the little time-savers can add up and provide big savings on your next project!

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