IFIX carry over to next picture

Anyone have an idea on how I can get an animation to work. when I click on the button to go to another picture, I want to animate certain items on the new picture so the user can quickly follow pipes from one screen to another. I can somewhat get it to work but only if the previous picture is left open. but we need to keep only current pictures open since its on a terminal services machine and do not want to waste resources.

What kind of animation do you need? I believe the mechanism in iFix for this is Tag Substitution where you create a TGD file and then call the image with that file passed on or something similar. It's been a while since I've worked on it.

I'm not sure what you actually mean, but from your description it sounds like you want pipes from one picture that also appear on another to be animated, I do not quite see what the problems is you just use the same tag to animate it. for example, if a pipe on one picture extends to the edge of that picture and is also on the following picture and uses the same animation tag. I think you need to explain the problem in a little more detail.

the pipes are already animated. the pipes on our pictures lead to a button which takes you to a button on the next picture where that pipe picks back up. I would like to animate the button on the next picture to quickly show the operators where they came from. there are several pipes and buttons on each picture.


example: pic1, click button to go to pic2, on pic 2 the button that would take you back to pic 1 is what I would like to animate. also if you are on pic2 you could follow that pipe (maybe through some valves) and click a button to go to pic3. which clicking that button would then animate the button on pic3 showing where you came from.



I know how to do animations but can't get this to work without leaving the previous pic open.


the way I did get it to work was by having both pics stay open. I allowed the button to be selected in animation. then when that button is selected it would flash the button on the next picture for 5 seconds.



We are running 2 terminal services with 20+ clients and RDP sessions per server so we need to limit unnecessary resource hogging. so our subroutine automatically closes the previous pic when the new one is open.


I also want to avoid making a tag for each one. we already have over 49000 tags in our database and want to avoid making too many more.

You can create a global variable in the user.fxg to do this.

There is a method to create a "back" button that returns you to a previous pic. You might already have one created.
Have the button animation flash if the entry in the "Back" queue matches the pic you want it to flash upon.
I have no time in the near future to test this theory but it sounds right.

We do have a back button. when I get a chance i will try something with that.

let me know how that works out, maybe share the technique