Description

Components can be grouped together (or made into a container) so that they act like a single component in the Designer.

Video recorded using: Ignition 7.7

Transcript

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[00:00] When you're developing windows in Ignition, it's very common to want to group components together, so that way they can move around the screen as one unit. By default, when you drag components into a window, like if I drag a cylindrical tank and I drag a linear scale, these are two separate components, they're independent, I can configure them separately, and then move them around the screen separately. Of course, I can highlight and select both components, I can move around the screen as one unit. But I have to remember to actually select both components every time. Rather than doing that, I can actually select both of them and right click and say group here, which allow us to actually group those components together into one unit. In the top left, in the Project Browser, you'll see a new container being added, and then both components are inside that container. So now I can just simply click on the one container of the one group and move around the screen as an entire unit. If I still want to configure the components inside, there's two ways I can select the tank, or the linear scale. The first is to go up here in the project browser and actually select individual components to actually go and modify the properties. The second would be to click on the group, and then double click to actually get a red outline, so that I can go inside the group and select individual components. Once I have a group, it is possible to ungroup it, we can right click here and ungroup that. That's actually to break them out to separate components. So of course, we can have groups, as many components as we want. So let's say I drag a few more components in, I select all of them, I right click and group. Now they're one unit, I can move around the screen. Now as being a group by default, when you have a group here and you make the the group larger, the components are going to resize at a relative rate. Sometimes you don't want that to actually happen. You can add more components inside the group, but rather than doing that, you can actually right click on the group, and you can say convert to container. What this allow us to actually do, it's still grouped together as one unit, but you can make the container larger, and nothing inside of it will resize, which is perfect if we want to put more stuff inside, like a progress bar or level indicator. Now the big thing about using a container, rather than the actual group we had before, they're both the same concept, but it just doesn't resize components. So, the big thing here is that actually to move that container around the window, you have to hold down Alt, and then click on the container and move it around. Otherwise, if you don't hold down Alt, it tries to highlight components inside of that group. But if you look up on the top left, in the Project Browser, you can see that there's the group, and all the components are inside of it. So basically, it's easy to take a lot of components, and group them together as one unit, so that it's logically separate from each other on the window.

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