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If you are new to PhixFlow and designing screens for an application, start with the Building Applications training course.

This page is a reminder of the drag-and-drop principles that you use when designing screens.

• Dragging components
  • Drag -sibling
  • Shift Drag child inside
  • Preferred parent link → Drag puts it directly inside PP (child) AND  as a sibling of any other content. eg. Tile container has many tiles.
• Parent child and preferred parent - link out
• Reordering on screen and in repository 

Moving Things around

Component, Layout, parent-child.

Use the repository so that you can bring all a layout.

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Dragging into a Screen

To add a component to a screen, you can drag in:

• components

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• or layouts from
  • the palette
  • the repository → Templates (anywhere else.
• streams (tables) or their attributes, to add data-bound components such as grids, charts or form-fields.

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To drop an item onto a form that would normally be created unpinned (see table above) as pinned - hold the Ctrl key down while dragging.

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Pinning and Unpinning

You can connect forms to data in a stream by simply dragging the stream icon from its property tab onto the form. PhixFlow will prompt you to select the type of stream or card view that you want to create; see Stream Views Pop-Up Menu.

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fix the position of a component on an area by pinning it. When you drag a component or layout in from the palette it is automatically pinned. (See the table above for all pinned/unpinned) todo.

Unpinned

When you drag in an unpinned component, PhixFlow automatically puts it in in the next space available. By default, this is underneath the previous component. However, you can control the flow using CSS properties. Components in forms are represented as DIV objects. 

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Pinned components can be placed anywhere on the form an area and you can drag pinned components to any position on a formscreen.

You can " pin " the edges of the component to its parent component using the Positional Settings in the component's details. To do this, set the offsets between the top, right, bottom and left edges of the component to those of the parent. The offsets are in number of pixels between the edge of the component and the edge of the parent. An example of pinning a component to its parent in this way is given in the video above. 

Switching

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Between Unpinned and

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Pinned

Pinned components can be dragged over unpinned components, so be careful when mixing pinned and unpinned components on a form, . Think of these as being laid out in two separate, overlapping layers on the formscreen.

To change an unpinned component to pinned, press the Ctrl key down and  and drag it.

To unpin a pinned component, right-click on it and select Unpin Selected Objects. You can select several components at once, and unpin them all using this option. The components will move into the next available space in their respective parent components.

Preventing Accidental Dragging

Pinning relates to a components parent-child relationship. It does not 

Fix a component in position on the screen.
To Fix a component, use the position properties. Avoid if you want responsive design

To prevent accidental dragging.

To prevent accidental dragging of components and layouts on the screen, go to the components properties → Positional Settings section, and tick Prevent Dragging.

Finding a Component's

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Container

Anchor
formBuildingFindComponentParent formBuildingFindComponentParent

In most cases, a component's parent is fairly obvious - and you can find it by clicking just outside the area of the component. In some cases, it is not obvious. Remember also that with pinned components, you could drag a component from an area, which is its parent, into another area, so that the component now appears in an area that is not actually its parent.

There are a number of ways of determining a component's parent:

• Open the details for the component; at the top of the details, the name of the parent will be shown - to get more details, click on the quick link Parent to open the details for the parent
• Right-click on the component in the form and select Find in Explorer - this gives you a useful way of visually seeing what the parent is, and indeed how other components on the form relate to this component

Moving a component to a new parent

To move a component To find the container of a component in a screen, you can:

• right-click on the component and select Find in Explorer .
  PhixFlow opens the Layouts with the component selected. You can then see how the selected component fits into the parent-child hierarchy.
• click on the space next to the component to open its properties.
  This option is less reliable as a screen becomes more complex.

Moving Components and Layouts

You can move components and layouts around on the screen, but we recommend you use the repository Layouts list as it is easier to drag layouts and be clear about the parent and sibling relationships you want.

To move a component or layout to a new parent, press Shift and drag it to the new parent. Commonly this is used to move components inside an area to a new area.

To confirm that the component has moved to the new parent, remember the techniques to find the parent of a component: Find a component's parent

Preventing components from being dragged

Sometimes, when laying out a form, you may find it interesting to "lock" a component in place, to stop yourself dragging it to a new position by accident. To do this, in the component properties → Positional Settings section, tick Prevent Dragging.

Auto Sizing

When you are designing a screen, you can use the Layout area → Style Settings→ Auto-size property to make components adjust automatically when the application's window is resized by the user. 

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You can use the context menu option

How tos

Reminder of the training, specific techniques.

Build Up a basic form

Note that there are no fancy flow stuff for this.

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1. Create screen 
2. Open palette
3. Add Basic Components > Form, and name
4. Click on the screen to open the properties for your area. In shared styles you will see that this has some default shared styles applied.
5. Palette Labelled fields > Add labelled fields you need. Click to see properties
   • The Labelled fields palette has composite items - see the Basic Settings checkbox.
   • there are two parts, a static text label and the data field. Making them composite means
   • They move as if they are one thing
   • The name you give to the items is used as the text for the label.
6. Attributes list - open stream > attributes section or expand for list in repository
7. Drag from attribute onto form

Moving things around

To make sure you are moving a whole parent/child set of things and moving them within an area it is easiest to move things in the Layouts list in the repository

Animation of dragging in the 

Creating Clear Spaces on a Screen

You can divide up a screen into multiple parts, called dashboard elements, using the Add options. In the repository, you can see the different elements listed under the dahboard.

Option 1: Use the add area

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Dividing screens

There are 2 ways to divide a screen.

Use Context Menu Options

1. Right-click a screen
2. Use one of the Add Area... options to add a new part for the screen, separated with a dividing line.
   PhixFlow creates a new dashboard element for this part of the screen.
3. Add a suitable container, such as an area, form or card container.

Use a Palette Layout

Some palettes have layouts that have 2 areas contained by a split-view area. For example:

• Basic Components → Split View Image Added
• Theme 2 - App Builder Base Components → Area Split  Image Added

1. In the screen canvas toolbar, click

   Insert excerpt
   _palette _palette nopanel true

   .
2. Expand a palette to find a layout that has 2 areas.
3. Drag the layout from the palette onto an existing area.
4. PhixFlow creates a layout with the following structure:

Area

Split View (special type of area)

Area 1

Area 2

Connecting Layouts to Data

To connect a form area to data in a stream (table) 

From the repository, drag the stream name onto an area or layout

From the stream (table) properties, drag the icon at the top of the properties onto an area or layout.

Todo - check and link

PhixFlow will prompt you to select the type of stream or card view that you want to create; see Stream Views Pop-Up Menu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCeiTdv0ty4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXt89u6QGXE

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