Form Design Environment

The Designer is a graphical design application that allows you to easily create forms and user displays and publish them to the application server where other authors can access and use them.

The Designer includes different types of interface controls including buttons, text boxes and blocks, check boxes, grids, panels, list and combo boxes, and much more. All of the controls have properties for configuring their look, feel, and behavior.

User displays created through the Designer work with the Navigator context just as the other displays do. For more information on displays, see Display Panel. The most commonly used user displays are reports that can be viewed in the workspace, and are not intended to be run in a workflow.

The forms you create in the Designer can be used to monitor real-time data and can also be used to pass new values to a workflow, which can then update the appropriate data source. The Designer uses Microsoft Visual Studio projects as its own project format, allowing your applications to be extended using all of the power of .NET.

Note: The Designer supports the Visual Basic and C# programming languages.

As you work on your display, you can save it to your local machine or save it to the server.

Important: You must save the display to the server before you can navigate away from the Designer. For example, if you want to preview a display in the Global Viewer, you must save it to the server. Be aware, however, that saving the display to the server makes it available to other authors to edit, use, or view.

If you want to preview a display without navigating away from the Designer, open the Preview panel, or build and run the project within the Designer.

Note: For security reasons, you must log into Workflow to view a test build of your form or user display.

The Designer can connect to any of the Workflow data sources that can be accessed through a workflow; for example, Historian and equipment properties.

The Designer tab is comprised of the following components:

Component	Description
Toolbar	The toolbar provides the ability to perform actions within the Designer. For more information, see Designer Toolbar.
Panels	The panels allow you to organize your working space for designing and developing forms and user displays. For more information, see Display Panel.

In the Designer, layout is managed by top-level containers, often canvases, panels, or grids. The type of container you choose determines the style of the layout for your screen. All control editing must be done in a container.

Regardless of the type of container you choose for your layout, the same basic rule applies: an object's position is always determined by its container. In addition, a number of containers also handle the size of their child objects.

The development of a document typically begins with the selection of a container as a root element. While there are many different types of containers to choose from, WPF applications often use a canvas or a grid as the root object. Other containers are available, such as dock panel, stack panel, and uniform grid.