The addition of the “Number Mark for Annotation” in the Resource Sharing pane inspired me to post this idea. I’ve started saving versions of the various annotation elements (balloon, post-it, numbered annotations) with two custom actions – one for “hideMe” and another for “showMe”. As you may have guessed, “hideMe” just hides the element, and “showMe” shows the element. Then at the top of each plot, I include a little toolbar that has a button for hiding all annotations, and another for showing all annotations.
It works pretty well. Every time I drag a new annotation out, it already has the custom actions on it, so it will be able to be controlled with the buttons in the header.
It would be even better though if this action was built-in to ForeUI – if you could just identify that certain elements are annotations, and there was a specific action or button for hiding/showing annotations. It seems like everybody that uses annotations struggles with the same issue of how to effectively hide/show them. The custom event solution I posted here works pretty well, but having it built-in would be one step more amazing!
Thanks for all the hard work; the updates recently (particularly being able to go to a page based on a variable) have made life a lot easier!
3 answers
Very good point 🙂 Thank you Mark.
We will enhance the simulation framework a lot in 3.0, the annotation show/hide is one of the new features. So the feature you suggested will be built-in.
Your current work around is really good, I would suggest other users to do so if they wish to show/hide annotations before 3.0 is out. In order to help others understand Mark’s solution, I made two figures to explain it:
I’ve followed Mark D’s exellent idea by adding custom events to each post-it, but I’ve encountered a problem.
All post-its across all pages in my plot are hidden/shown when activation the custom events.
You are adding a better annotation feature in 3.0, and I’m wondering if it would be possible to not hide/show all annotations but only the ones that are relevant for the current page.
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You can add a conditional branching to check the {Current_Page_Index} or {Current_Page_Title} system property before showing/hiding the post-it. It is not very convenient though, as you need to change the expression for post-its in different pages.
In 3.0, every element can be marked as "annotation". You can show or hide all "annotation" elements via button/menu on the tool bar in simulation. Of course it is also possible to just show/hide "annotation" elements in current page.