I love your Action editor and what it is able to do. I was hoping for a little more help with groups though. I am working on making some custom elements that are comprised of many individual parts and various levels of groupings. It would be super nice to be able to add an action for a group. Right now I have to work around by ungrouping, and then assigneing the action to one of my elements that is roughly the same size as the group. Even more importantly, can some additional selection tools be incorporated into the “Operate on Element/Please Choose an Element” dialog? I love your ability on the plot to use the “Select Element” interface as well as drawing a selection rectangle, but sadly these are missing from this dialog, and are only left with single click and Previous/Next buttons. When you have a lot of elements that closely overlap, it makes selection a huge pain.
4 answers
You can define the action for group member via the context menu, just right click the selected group you will see this:
The “Operate on Element…” action can only have one target element, but if you like to show/hide or move a group of elements, it is possible. Just select the entire group as the target element:
Hi Xavier, thanks for the reply. I wasn’t aware of the right-click ability, that’s nice. It would still be nicer yet to define a click event for the entire group, but I can understand that it might sound easier to do than it really is. I can live with this part.
On the second part (choosing an element), I’m aware that it is possible to select a group, it’s just that it’s a bit cumbersome when you have a lot of groups and elements defined in a custom element. What I’m asking for is better selection methods than the previous/next and single click. I really like how you can draw a selection rectange and use the “select element” method on the main plot. I just sent you a file related to a bug post that is a good example of this. It’s a menu of sorts, and if you try to set an action to one of the menu items to operate on another (to move its location, for example), it’s really time consuming to get the right group selected.
Hi pohldoug,
I agree with you that it can be hard to get your hands on the right element if they are placed on top of each other. I would like the “Select element” tree structure to be available in the “Please choose an element” dialog also.
Are you aware, that you can type the name of the element instead of using the mouse to select?
In the “Operate on Element” dialog you can start typing the name, and the elements are shown in a list below:
You have to spend some time naming your elements meaningfully – otherwise it will be very difficult to choose the right element…
sweet. No, I was not aware of that, that definitely helps a lot. I have already taken the time to assign meaningful names to my elements (anticipating difficulty in later selection), so I’m pretty much good to go. The methods I described would still be nice, but this definitely gets me by. Thanks Ulrich!
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