Popup from trigger

[pinballmark]

I went down this path a few years ago with the same roadblocks.

The way I got around it was to use a variable in the variable driver and a field animated image that is then placed within an overlay on every page. States are used to hide it when an alarm is not active. When something happens that needs my attention the var driver field is set to true, and the overlay is then visible with a flashing icon. There is a command button over the top of the image that then pops up the overlay with the alarm information.

Pressing exit changes the variable field to false to hide the alarm icon.

very convoluted but it works.

Mick

Thanks Mick, i actually did see that thread during my searching early this morning. What's different for me is I'd like to avoid having to jump up and press a command button every time a dog walker walks into my driveway :-)

[Dean Roddey]

Well, motion sensors, in a V2 driver anyway, send standard motion triggers, one for start motion and one for end motion, where the end motion report is always delayed for some period of time to avoid ongoing motion causing a lot of events.

So, if all you care about is that motion sensor, then you could do the event trigger based scheme, where start motion shows the overlay and end motion hides it. The natural delay of the motion end trigger would provide you wit what you need I think.

[pinballmark]

The sensors reset too quickly to make that useful.

I think I can work out the delay period; it's the displaying of the overlay on top of the auto gen tiles that is the roadblock right now. It's more like an underlay.

Once I have that solved I can work on adding a time based auto hide or dismiss and hopefully a command button on the auto gen template for a manual hide option.

[pinballmark]

Dean, just another comment and sorry for double posting.

During my research last night and this morning I read a number of requests going back to like 2006. I think the event driven popup would be a genuinely useful feature.

A couple of examples:

My motion sensor/video popup situation.

Display an security popup with details of the event.

Heck, i would make a flashing red popup if something really bad happened such as a water leak.

You have alluded to risk; is that related to what the popup might do? I would propose as a compromise the only permitted action is dismiss the popup. So we could have an Invoke Popup action available and all it could do is dismiss itself. The intent is it is for displaying information/images and it could be restricted to same.

Mark

[Dean Roddey]

The gotcha is that it's really easy to have them happen on top of each other and get layered up and kill the IV. You either have to accept that anything that happens after one of them comes up will not be lost (i.e. guarantee only one can be visible at once), or that the IV could get killed while no one is watching it.

And other issue is making sure it never happens at a bad time, such that it would get the IV into a situation that it can't deal with properly, because the thing that causes it can happen any time, including while you are interacting with the IV directly. That's really hard to insure it's going to do the right thing.

Anyway, not that it's impossible, and not that I don't see the utility in it of course, it's just that it's a complicated thing to add to a very complicated thing, and there's just not been time to really address it relative to other things so far.

[Dean Roddey]

The sensors reset too quickly to make that useful.

I think I can work out the delay period; it's the displaying of the overlay on top of the auto gen tiles that is the roadblock right now. It's more like an underlay.

Just make sure that the overlay is the top-most widget in the main template. Bring it to the front (bottom-most thing in the widget palette.) You can right click on it and select to bring it to the top. That should make it show up on top of anything else in the base template (though not above any popups.)

It would likely be best to make it full screen so that there's no danger of the user trying to interact with something else until it's dismissed.

[pinballmark]

Thank you, that worked great to display the overlay of the web image. I should have thought of that; it is difficult to know what is "on top".

So if the overlay is now on top on the original template, is there way to configure a command button to close/hide the overlay and get back to the original?

Perhaps the overlay template is outside the scope of the original template so it does not appear on the list (the actual template name is displayed and I select hidden but the overlay container is not an option to select and hide).

The net effect is when I press the command button the overlay disappears and then immediately reappears. This is likely due to the overlay was calling the template with Load Initial Interface selecting the template file as initially invisible. The command button in the Tile Template simply sets this to Normal so of course it is stuck there. Frustrating.

[Dean Roddey]

Oh, a button inside the overlay can't target its parent container (the overlay) by name, and there's no way to indirectly access it. So the button will have to be outside of the overlay I guess. That's one of those chicken and egg things. There are some commands that implicitly affect the container of the widget that invokes them (like LoadNewTemplate), but having all of them be able to do that would require some considerable changes to how things work. The button is inside the template that you created. That stuff just got loaded into the overlay dynamically, so they never had any way to know about they overlay they eventually got loaded into.

But a button outside of the overlay can access it by name, so if you can figure out how to do that in reasonable way, it will work. That button would just call SetWidgetState on the overlay and set it to Hidden.


As to on top, the widget palette shows you the order. The first one in the palette is the 'further back' and the last one is the front one, and the others are overlaid in the order they are in the palette.