todo

• Screen, repository, palette, components
  • point to themes and palettes
• Types of component and what they look like
  •  forms
  • grids
  • etc
• Data backed components - link out
• Parent child and preferred parent

This page is for application designers. It explains the basic principles for how to add components from the palette as well as features to help you.

Overview

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

Finding a Component's Parent 

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 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.

How tos

Reminder of the training, specific techniques.

Build Up a basic form

Note that there are no fancy flow stuff for this.

What data do you need to show - 

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 theBasic 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.