INFORMIX
Visionary User's Guide
Chapter 5: Displaying Data in a Scene
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Inserting Content into Empty Layouts

 The following layouts appear empty after you insert them into a scene:

The Layout wizard does not prompt you for data values for these layouts. You must specify data values manually by inserting primitives, such as text or pictures, into the data element and then mapping data to the object. This creates a data-bound object in the layout. For more information about data-bound objects, see "Creating Data-Bound Objects".

Tip: For the table pattern, some of the cells in the table might appear empty because the Layout wizard allows you to specify some table cells as blanks, so that you can later insert content into these blank cells.
The following example inserts a Picture object into a matrix layout. To map other data values, you can use columns from your data source. For more details about stock images, see Chapter 11, "Adding Resources and Global Parameters to a World," and also refer to the on-line help.

To insert a picture into an empty matrix pattern

    1. Select the matrix pattern in the Scene Editor.

    2. Choose View Data Element to display the data element of the matrix pattern in the Data Element Editor.

    3. Choose Insert Primitive Picture to insert a picture into the data element.

    4. Map a column that contains an image from your data source to the ImageSource property of the Picture object.

    Click the column button in the Parameter toolbar of the Data Element Editor so that a red dot appears.

    5. Click Runtime Mode to view your results.

You can also create stock images from image files and store them in your world. Mapping stock images to pictures is faster than mapping image columns from database tables. However, stock images increase the size of your world.

Tip: If the Object Inspector is not displayed, choose View Object Inspector to display it.
You can add other data-bound objects to a layout. For example, you might want the width of a polyline in a linear map to vary according to some column value in the data source. You could map the column value to the width or color of the Polyline object so that the line stands out from other lines or shows degree of importance.

For more information about mapping columns to object properties, see "Mapping Columns or Parameters to Properties".



Visionary User's Guide, version 1.0
Copyright © 1998, Informix Software, Inc. All rights reserved.