Is there some way to hide or make visible a specific control

Product Suggestions
1

Is there some way to Hide or Make Visible a specific widget, from a trigger function?

2

What I usually do when I have to do this is two things. First, make a rectangle to go on top of it and fake toggling its visibility by attaching its color to a variable, which you can change from the trigger. Second, to totally disable the trigger, you have to add a variable, then use that variable as a precondition of the trigger.

Disclaimer: I donā€™t work for Tulip, just an outside user.

3

Hey @wkurth4008.

@wz2b hit the nail on the head here. Right now this is the best way to make an element visible/invisible. This has been identified by the engineering team as a big pain point and there are a few ongoing projects to make this use case easier.

There is work coming very soon that will make this approach less painful, but wont completely replace it. There is a lot of discussion right now around the right architecture changes to make widgets easier to interact with in triggers (think size, color, position , etc.). This work isnā€™t scheduled yet, but is on the roadmap for the product. If I had to guess this second phase work wont be happening until late 2022.

Hope this provides a little context
Pete

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Some minor feedback on the new/proposed feature: ā€œdisabledā€ is probably a bigger property for us than ā€œhidden.ā€ My workaround for that is to use a variable-based color on the button and have another variable that masks the trigger when I want it to be ā€œdisabledā€ but you can still see the button movement so itā€™s not actually disabled.

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This is super good context. Totally agreed that this is the trickiest part of the rectangle over the thing you want to hide approach. This kind of functionality is within scope of that work.

Like all new features, we look to make the product more powerful while keeping easy things easy, Being able to dynamically adjust what triggers run is incredibly powerful, but also potentially makes app debugging a bit of a nightmare (at least right now it can all be debugged by checking conditionals on triggers in developer mode). Imagine a Tulip experience where some rogue trigger is turning off others with limited visibility, and how challenging that could potentially be to debug.

Not something we wont enable - Just something we need to do right to insure the added complexity comes with added visibility.

Pete

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Thanks Pete and wz2b . Those insights and suggestions are very helpful!!

William Kurth

BTW, Iā€™d much rather see, sooner, the ability to set the ā€˜focusā€™ order of controls and/or the ability to remove controls from gaining focus :grinning:

1 Like
7

Early today we struggled with this too. We tried to introduce a ā€œconstTransparentā€ color variable configured as fully transparent, but when assigning with a trigger to the object it actually became blue :grin:.
Any ideas if this approach to hide stuff is a viable path as well?

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Moving this to Product suggestions; upvote it there if you want it too.

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Thanks RussWaddell, ASharp-J, Pete_Hartnett, and wz2b. I kind of figured out at least one way to solve my own problem here. I have a text box associated with a variable. The background of the text box is the same as the page background. I initialize the text to be blank(""). On a Timer Trigger, or I suppose any other type of trigger, I put a value in that variable and it appears. Hooray!!

Again, thanks.

William

BTW, I have my text box set to blink so it kind of stands out when it ā€˜comes upā€™ :slight_smile:

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