The Designer
The Designer is where operator screens are built. It runs in the browser, edits live — the gauge on your canvas is already moving — and publishes to LiveView, the runtime operators use.
The workspace
| Area | Contents |
|---|---|
| Canvas | The view being edited. |
| Component palette | 56 widgets, 9 drawing tools, and 1048 P&ID and electrical symbols — plus your own in the symbol library. |
| Project browser | Views, scripts, named queries and assets in the project. |
| Properties panel | The selected component's properties, with a bind control on each. |
| Binding Manager | Configure the source and transforms for a bound property. |
| Event Manager | Attach actions to component events, and handlers to messages. |
| Symbol Editor 1.0.8 | Draw or import your own symbols and give them behaviour. |
| Namespace panel | The tag tree, for drag-to-bind. |
Building a screen
- Create a view and pick its layout mode.
- Drop components from the palette.
- Bind properties to tags, expressions, other components or queries. → Property bindings
- Attach events — navigate, write a tag, run a script, show a notification. → Event actions
- Save. The view is served to LiveView immediately.
What makes a good screen
Three principles carry most of the value:
Show state, not data. An operator needs to know whether the line is healthy, not to read fourteen numbers and decide. Use colour, position and shape to make the abnormal obvious, and keep raw values available for when it is not.
Build one thing once. Twenty motors deserve one faceplate view, embedded twenty times with a parameter — not twenty screens. The visualization counterpart of a UDT is an embedded view.
Do the work on the tag, not on the screen. Units, scaling, formatting and deadband belong to the tag, where every screen inherits them. A formatting decision repeated in forty widgets is forty places to be inconsistent.
Live authoring
The canvas is connected to real data while you design. Bindings resolve, tags update, alarms annunciate. The live preview in the binding manager shows the resolved value with its transforms applied — so you find out that your expression divides by zero at commissioning-time, not at 03:00.
Saving does not end your undo history: you can undo past a save, and the view shows as unsaved again. → Undo and saving
Concurrent editing
View resources are optimistically locked. Saving carries the revision you loaded; a concurrent save by someone else is rejected with a conflict rather than silently overwriting. Presence indicators show who else is in the project.
Assets
| Store | Scope | Use |
|---|---|---|
| File library | Gateway-wide | Shared images, models, documents (needs Manage File Library) |
| Project files | One project | Assets specific to this application |
| Uploads | Workspace | Files written by scripts (system.files.*) and by the Upload widget |
Assets are referenced by path, so a replaced file updates every screen that uses it.
Permissions
| Action | Permission |
|---|---|
| Open the Designer, edit views | Manage Designer |
| Export / import the view tree | Manage Designer |
| Draw, import, edit and delete symbols | Manage Symbol Library 1.0.8 |
| Manage the file library | Manage File Library |
| View published screens | View Projects, or a runtime role in LiveView |
In this section
| Page | Contents |
|---|---|
| Views & layout | Layout modes, embedded views, repeaters, navigation |
| Property bindings | Tag, property and query bindings; transforms; indirection |
| Event actions | Every action a component event can perform |
| Drawing & symbols | Vector shapes, pipes and flow arrows, and the P&ID and electrical symbol library |
| Symbol Editor | Your own symbols: parts, parameters, rules, states and ports |
| LiveView | The operator runtime |
| Components | The complete widget reference |