Conditional Interface Elements

Concept

Sometimes it is necessary to show only some parts of the interface, depending on the experience, rights, needs, ... of the end-user. The CHILI Publisher workspaces allow you to do just that.
Within a workspace you can set the behavior or visibility of some interface elements based upon certain conditions f.e auto selection of the Image properties panel when an image frame is selected or hide some icons for end-users.

More about workspaces and how the create and edit one can be found here: Managing Workspaces, WorkSpace Settings, Arranging your workspace

Auto-selection of tabs

In the properties of a tab you specify whether the panel should be selected automatically when a frame of a certain type is selected

.

• Only for end users : only end users can have this tab autoselected
• Keep selected (ignore other panels) : this tab will stay selected
• Expand tab if needed : tab will be selected and show its panels when one or more of the following type of objects are selected
  • On selection of : 
    • Nothing : 
    • Multiple Frames :
    • Text Frame : 
    • Text :
    • Ad Frame :
    • Barcode :
    • Image Frame :
    • Snippet Frame :
    • Table Frame :
    • Shape Frames :

"Only for Frame Type"

The tab will only be visible in the interface based on which type of frame is selected, for example, if the Text tab is set to frame type "Text", you will ONLY see the Text tab (thus have access to) when a text frame is selected.

To complete the logic : whenever any other frame type than Text is selected, the Text tab will simply not be there.

User Rights

Availability of a tab for user types : all users, only administrators, or normal user.

Panel and Toolbar properties

Panel Properties (example of Image Settings panel):

Here we see an example of the Image Settings panel and all its conditional items. For every item you can select

the condition of its availability: Yes / No, or for which type of user : administrators or end users. 

Screenshot above : conditions pulldown as seen in toolbar and panel properties settings


Toolbar Properties (example of Document Actions, file saving..)

Here we see a toolbar example with conditional items. These are the properties  from the "Document Actions" (save file etc)

in the main toolbar. As for panels and tabs, you can set the conditions Yes / No or user based (administrators or end users)

Variables

Variables can also be conditionally hidden or visible. This is done using "filter" keywords. If the user enters one of those words

or even a part of a keyword, only those variables containing or sharing those filter tags will be visible in the Variables tab > Variable Input panel.

This can be a convenient way to group input fields of variables based on certain categories or kind, for example. Also this way you dont need to

duplicate and adjust multiple different copies of the document, just because some variables can or cannot be visible.

For more information, see Variable Settings

Using display filters on variables

Below you see three variables created in Variable Data tab > Variable List panel

These are then displayed as followed in the input panel Variables tab > Variable Input panel

Suppose only the variable vegetables should be visible in certain cases, how do we do that ?

• go to Variable Data tab > Variable List panel
• click the variable vegetables
• go to Variable Data tab > Variable Settings panel, you'll see the settings of the variable you just clicked
• go to the General tab in that settings panel
• enter a keyword in the Display Filter field, in this example the word "vegetables" is used, see screenshot below
  
  
  

• now go to the Variables tab > Variable Input panel
• click the edit properties icon (little pencil), the properties of the variable input panel appears
• enter the word "vegetables" in the Filter field, or only a part of the keyword, for example "veg"

Opening the properties window

Entering the filter word in the properties window

Resulting display of the filter (left screenshot), compared to the display before the filter (right screenshot)


Another example : enter only "e" in the filter field:

Resulting display of variable inputs, as only these variables have a filter keyword that contains the "e" character