Red Lion popup, grey out the background?

[Joe E.]

I have a G308, running Crimson 3.0 Build 640.001. I have some controls on a second display that I'm calling as a popup from the manual controls display. When the popup is visible, the controls on the main display are not operable (as it should be) but they're still fully visible. I would like to dim the main display, maybe with a grey rectangle at 50% transparency, to make it clear to the user that the controls will not (and should not) operate. Is this possible?

[Joe E.]

I contacted Red Lion tech support. It looks like this isn't really possible.

[TimWilborne]

Ooh I like that idea! Lot's of times the operator doesn't close the popup and can't figure out why nothing else works. Why not technically dimming the rest of the screen, how about changing the background color to a dimmer color before showing a popup?__________________

[cHud]

I dont know Readlion but this is what I would do with other softwares Do you have a visibility option on rectangle/square you can draw? If so draw it over the main page and set an internal bit with the button that opens the popup. Then reset the bit again with the button that closes the popup

[TimWilborne]

Yes but that would block the view of all other objects. What I believe Joe wants to do and I'm interested in is having the objects appear grey to bring priority to the pop up but still be able to see the grayed out values.

[Joe E.]

That's EXACTLY what I want to do!

[JRoss]

Only way I can see doing this would be a lot of work. Create an internal flag tag called GrayOut (or whatever). Use "GrayOut==0" as the Enable condition for all the active elements on the main screen, and also use it to change the colors of everything to appear dimmer. Then in the display properties of the popup under the Actions tab, put "Set(GrayOut,1)" in the On Select area and "Set(GrayOut,0)" in the On Remove area. You might have to monitor some other conditions to set/reset the GrayOut tag, for example reset it when the HMI power cycles. It isn't simple, but it would give you the feature you're looking for.

[TimWilborne]

Ok I had to get some help from Justin from Red Lion but I have a working demo that does what I would like and what I think Joe is looking for. You can't use the screen background color to do this but you can make an object the size of the screen and link it's color to a tag. In the case of this sample program, the tag is "BackgroundColor" with 0 being blue and 1 being gray. I have a popup that shows when you click the popup button. The properties of the popup screen I have added actions of "On select" BackgroundColor=1 and "On remove" BackgroundColor=0. Clicking it turns the "background" to gray. You can still see the clock running at the bottom yet the focus is on the blue. Also the attached sample works in the emulator so you can test without a screen. Dimming test changed.zip

[Joe E.]

Ok, so I played with it some. Unfortunately, I have all of my other screen objects colored to look right with a black background. Changing to another color didn't work well for what I have already, but I'll try to tinker with it when I get a chance. Maybe build it into my next project from scratch. Thanks for the tip! And for hunting it down with Red Lion.

[TimWilborne]

Glad it helped. It helps us polish our code by bouncing it off of each other.