Studio 5000 View Designer Selector Switch

This is my first dive into the newer "View Designer" after two decades of RSView/Factory talk.

Am I missing something or is there no simple built in "selector switch"?

I don't seem to be able to assign an image to the "button" objects.
I don't seem to be able to assign multiple images to an image object.
Nothing under "Buttons and Switches" seems to help either.

Have they really not bothered to build in some canned feature for this or am I missing something obvious?

selector switch

If you create a pushbutton and open properties, under the states tab, in the image setting section, you can set the image for each state of the button. If you click the ellipses by the image field, you get the image browser, and can paste selector switch images from the library.

I have searched all over and haven't been able to achieve what you mention. How are you defining "Pushbutton"? Is it the button under "CommonControls", or something else? I can't find anything with an image setting section on the state tab.

To this point, the only ways I have found to make this happen is to have overlapping image controls and fiddle with the visibility, or to have a set of images with a center that rotates based off of a conditional value. A lot of fuss for something that should be pretty simple. At least you have the ability to make reusable controls so that you don't have to keep re-creating it.

I don't think you're wrong; where you would typically find a canned 2-position or 3-position Selector Switch graphical object is among the 30mm and 22mm pushbutton objects, and it's not there.

My version 31 of View Designer doesn't appear to have image animation for Buttons, but rather the opposite: a Button action for a group of Images. I could certainly be overlooking something !

In some ways, View Designer is a step backwards from FactoryTalk View, and in more ways a step forward. It gives me the same sort of emotional reaction I have when trying to use FTViewME for an application where I would otherwise use Indusoft Web Studio: "why am I trying to type while wearing mittens ?".

I have an application where I'm converting a small FTView ME project from about four years ago to PanelView 5510, so I will be getting a little more experience with it, and step 1 is to upgrade to v32. Step 2 is going to be putting a truckload of effort into converting the Alarming features.

View Designer supports some SVG graphics in addition to BMP/PNG/JPG, so I can see users with some graphics skill doing really nice icons and symbols, or making use of commercial libraries.

But I'm disappointed that even the half-hearted Symbol Factory integration that FactoryTalk View had didn't make it into View Designer. I can actually go export (as low quality BMP) from Symbol Factory within FactoryTalk View and then those those as Image objects in View Designer, but I would have strongly preferred a good native SVG library for the sort of hardware panel devices (selector switches, pilot lights, pushbuttons of more than two colors) that an HMI panel is meant to replace.

Yep - no pre canned selectors. I have just done something similar to what Ken is mentioned. SLC 5/05 + old screen to a CmLX with pv 5510.

I ended up making a bunch of add on graphics to do that sort of thing. You can make one with 3 buttons, a state tag in the PLC and colour/state tables on each button. The you link the state tag to a parameter and you're off.

The real annoying thing I have found is that if you parameterise a piece of data in the add on graphic, you cannot just use a literal when you instance it. So if I have an indicator with a light, name, description parameter, those parameters MUST link to a controller tag.

From the Rockwell website...

This can be accomplished by importing a selector on image and a selector off image.

Once the images are imported follow these steps:
Add two image objects onto the screen, one of them using the selector on image and the other one using the selector off image
Right click on each object and choose Button Behavior --> Toggle a tag on release
On each object select the tag in the Events tab
In the Animations tab, click on Add Animation and choose State Table. Use the same tag from the Events tab in the State Table's Expression.
In the State Table Definitions window choose Visible only, click OK