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LESSON LIST
LESSON
The Designer User Interface
Description
Meet the Designer, the main tool you'll use when developing an Ignition project.
Video recorded using: Ignition 8.1
Transcript
(open in window)[00:00] The Ignition Designer has a lot going on inside of it. After all it is the doorway into the design and implementation of every ignition project. You can see here in my designer, we have a big central area, which will be the main development area once you have a resource open. Along the left and right hand sides, you have panels to control information. In the upper left hand corner, we have a Project Browser which lists out individual sections available in the designer, such as your scripting resources, perspective resources, transaction groups, vision resources, named queries and reports. Each section can be expanded to expose the available resources. Below that we have a tag browser, which shows all of the different tags we have in the system. The tag browser also gives users the ability to browse OPC resources via the OPC browser, which is here. A property editor down at the very bottom, which will change depending on which vision resources you have selected and will display all the available properties for this resource.
[01:04] Over on the right hand side, we have our component pallet, which lists all the different vision components that are available. If I select the perspective session in my project browser, we see that the designer moves around a bit. The vision property editor is now gone and replaced by the perspective property editor, which is now on the right. Also on the right, we can expand the perspective component pallet, which lists all the available perspective components. The central area of the designer will remain being the main perspective design area. Depending on what section of the project browser we have selected, the designer will adapt itself to that section. For instance, if I click on the report section of the project browser, I will be greeted by the report design space. Regardless of what section you have selected, you can modify the look of the designer by moving things around. For example, I can go to my tag browser and simply drag it and resize it whichever way I want. I can also drag it into the right hand side of the designer and pin it there if I wanted to. I can also close pallets like so.
[02:02] Now I have a very large design space area to work with. You may have noticed that when I drag a pallet around, it tries to pin itself in places around the designer. As I get close to the edges, it's going to try to pin itself to the side or to the bottom or wherever you're at. If you don't want it to do this, you can hold the control key down on your keyboard, and then as you move it around, it's not going to pin itself anywhere. You can put it exactly where you want it. These panels don't actually have to be inside the designer either. I can move my designer over here, grab my tag browser panel and drag it outside of the designer. Now here you can see if I had multiple different monitors, you could pull all of these different panels out of the screen and place them wherever you'd like. If something happens and you've lost one or closed it, or you want to get it back and you can't remember how, the easiest way is to go up to the menu bar at the very top and go to view, there's a reset panels button. If you click on that, it'll put everything back to the default place. If you want it to pull in just one particular panel or toolbar, you can go into view, in the menu bar and under panels, you can pick out individual ones.
[03:09] You can see there are some here like the Pipeline Block Editor, really only makes sense when you're looking at pipelines, but the selection is still available to you. Under project, we can access project properties, which lets us control things like the default database for this project, the default provider for this project, et cetera. We also have access to various scripting editors for gateway session and client event scripts. Our component menu allows you to control the settings associated with a vision component. You can interact with things like component layout, and component level scripts. The alignment and shape menus allow you to control vision components as well. Under the tools manual, we have perhaps my favorite items, the Database Query Browser and the Script Console. The Database Query Browser will allow you to directly query any database your gateway is interacting with directly from the designer. The Script Console will allow you to write and test Python code. It is treated sort of like a scripting playground.
[04:04] The tools manual also gives users access to the Image Management menu, Translation Manager and Symbol Factory, among others. The Help menu simply has a link to our Ignition User Manual, when clicking on the Help option. We also have access to the designer's diagnostics, which displays tons of useful metrics related to performance. Under the Menu bar, we have the Main Shaping and Drawing Tools. Those are up along the top edge here and down the right hand side. Alternatively, there is a list of panels available down at the very bottom here in the lower left hand corner. If I select this little button, you can see here is our list, as well as a reset panels button.