Symbol Designer looses access to non-visible shapes

[Michael]

I was working on creating a symbol in the designer. I wanted one of the shape''s visible property in the symbol set to false. Then the application will set it to true when appropriate.

While the shape is in the symbol and it can be accessed in the application, the Symbol Designer cannot not access it. Is there a way to gain access to the shape again in the Symbol Designer?

[Administrator]

Hello Michael,

I am afraid the current version of Essential Diagram does not provide a way to select a node that has been set as hidden or disabled, and this behavior extends to the SymbolDesigner as well. We realize the inconvenience of this behavior, and have logged a QA report on the issue. We will change the SymbolDesigner functionality in a future update of the product to allow all nodes(irrespective of their state) to be selected. Thank you for having raised the issue.

For the time being you can workaround the condition by directly editing the SymbolDesigner code to listen for nodes that have their EditStyle.Enabled or Visible properties changed, and if so, prevent the change, and reapply it when the symbol document is being saved. You can receive notifications of property changes on symbol nodes by adding a handler for the diagram control''s Model.PropertyChanging event in the SymbolDocument.cs file and examining the event argument for changes to the Visible or EditStyle properties. A simple hashtable added to the SymbolDocument class can keep track of the nodes on which the property is being applied, and the property change can be pre-empted by cancelling the event. Finally, modify the MainForm.FileSave_Click and FileSaveAs methods that are summoned when the SymbolModel is being saved, and reapply the cached properties before saving the document.

Hope the workaround helps. Please let me know if you have trouble with the implementation.

Regards,
Prakash Surendra
Syncfusion Inc.,

[Administrator]

Prakash,

Thanks for the advise.

[Jeffrey Wisneski]

I wanted to ask then if there a way to hide or make invisible a single symbol palette that is part of a symbol palette group and then make calls to add a hidden symbol from that hidden palette or does this fall within the limitations of the earlier presented question?

Our reasoning for doing / wanting this, we need a way to display symbols for diagrams created using the application we had in place before switching to Essential Tools. We would like to phase out some of our older symbols but allow access to them for backwards compatibility purposes. We believed that if we place all of the outdated symbols in a single symbol pallete and then hid that palette in the symbol palette group bar this might help resolve our problem.

Thank you,

Jeff Wisneski
T.E.G.
724-452-2205 Ext. 1

[Administrator]

Hi Jeff,

You can hide individual symbol palettes in the PaletteGroupBar, and also add/remove PaletteGroupView controls at will. The PaletteGroupBar/PaletteGroupView controls are merely specialized instances of the Essential Tools GroupBar and GroupView controls, and the GroupBar API will let you hide or add/remove child GroupView controls at will. The GroupBarItem type that represents each symbol palette in the PaletteGroupBar control has a GroupBarItem.Visible property that can be set to hide it. The GroupBar.GroupBarItems property provides the methods to add/remove GroupBarItems.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have questions about the implementation.

Prakash Surendra
Syncfusion Inc.,