How to make a big memory suddenly very small

[Ken Roach 194]

I came across an application and workaround today that merits mention here. A customer was using a PanelView 600 Touch-only terminal to control an industrial laundry machine (forget your Maytags;  this sucker has conveyors and and a 1.5" gas line).   His application was only 19 screens, yet he was running out of memory and was considering the much-more-expensive 6182 computers to meet his EOI needs. When I got my hands on his application, it became clear what he'd done;  there were five similar screens of one type (alarms) and five of another type (maintenance notices) which were full of text on a beveled 3-D rectangle background.   When I tried to edit the text, I couldn't.... the whole thing was a bitmap ! Well, ten full-screen bitmaps at 320x150 pixels x 16 colors.... they occupied about 32K each as Paint files.  HUGE memory hogs in the PanelView, which has only 240K for text and graphics. He just hadn't been satisfied with the PanelView text editing and positioning (please, no debate over those) and had decided to use a tool he knew he could trust;  MS Paint.

[Ken Roach 194]

The obvious thing to do was to manually retype all his text as native PanelView text objects, and to put it all on a similar-colored rectangle in the background to fill in the gaps between text objects. But he still wanted that graphical bezel (yes, one of the things the PV Standard lacks).   And a rectangular bezel with a big blank field in the middle takes just as much memory as one with text in the middle. Enter a very clever trick.... making a Graphic object into a Global object.   The trick is to Group the graphic object with some action type object like a pushbutton or an indicator.  Then, you can make the Grouped object Global.   Next, UnGroup the object. Now, when you right-click and select Global Objects, you'll find your graphical object with the name "No Text", or something to that effect.   You can now reference that on as many screens as you want, but it is only stored once in the PanelView. By the end of the day we had replaced his bezels with global objects and reduced the size of the PanelView application file by about 120K.

[93lt1 0]

What is the exact purpose of the "Group" and "Ungroup"? I ran across my first instance of this today. I was trying to edit the background color of some (but not all) numeric data displays. When I clicked on one they all became highlighted.......I figured out how to ungroup, but I guess I dont see the reason. Is it specifically  to make it easier to use a grouped global object?

[Ken Roach 194]

The way I understand it is for applications opposite of yours;  in which all the items in a group need to be moved around together so they don't lose their spatial relationship.   That's not as big a deal when you're snapping to a grid, but if you spent a long time painstakingly manouvering graphics and text together, you'll want to group them so you can position the whole agglomeration together. I know one reason I use Grouping is when I have several text or background objects I want to keep in the background together;  instead of trying to click each one in the right order to get them stacked in layers (kinda like Autocad, without the transparency) I make them a Group.  Every time I use the "send to background" button, PanelBuilder sequences through the items putting them in front of one another until I get the sequence I wanted. It's also easier to make grouped items Global so they retain their positions as you reproduce them between screens. That's my 2 cents, anyhow.   I've been using PanelBuilder for a long time now and I still don't know everything about it.