Designing for different screen resolutions

[Robyn]

Hi,

This is my first real project out to the customer and I realise as I draw near the end of development that I don't know what screen resolution he will run this DF project on. I have designed it on 1280 x 1024 pixel display which is not a modern widescreen. This must be an issue which many come across, is there a logical or semi automated way of changing to a different resolution?

Thanks

[AzeoTech]

Alas, no, not at present. It is a key new feature request, for example here: http://www.azeotech.com/board/index.php?/topic/3949-screen-mode/. It is actually more involved than you would think for us to implement, but will be a part of the long promised big release. For now, you will unfortunately need to design for the lowest common denominator or do as the ashlandWater sample does and create multiple versions of the pages.

[Robyn]

Thanks, I look forward more and morer to the new release.

How is the screen resolution set in the existing one anyway? It just seems to default to the computer you are using? I can't find a way of setting the display size. Sorry if I have missed it.

[AzeoTech]

DAQFactory pages don't pay attention to screen resolution. You can put a component anywhere you want, including off the screen, though of course since the mouse can't go off the screen, the only way to do this is through script. This might be done, for example, if you wanted to create a report with some trend graphs and then use the page.printPDF() function to print them. Since most screens are landscape, to do a portrait report, you basically have to put much of the content off screen.

That all said, the actual displayable area of the screen is determined by the resolution of the primary monitor. This means that if you have a small primary monitor and a huge secondary monitor and try and open DAQFactory on that secondary monitor, it will only display up to the size of the small monitor.

All these issues stem from DAQFactory's maturity (the P.C. way of saying "age"). 12 years ago when DF first came out, there really were only 2 or 3 monitor resolutions, and multimonitor systems were very rare and poorly supported by Windows. Now, of course, there are many different resolutions and most everyone has at least two monitors. Unfortunately, because of the way DF's UI is coded, making a zoom / scroll feature is a bit harder than one would think and thus the wait until we can rewrite that section of code.

[Robyn]

Thanks for that

[Justin]

I know this is an old thread, but is this feature still on the to-do list? I just switched monitors and several of my components are off screen, as is the workspace toolbar apparently. Any way to recover these easily?

[AzeoTech]

Yes, and it has become a bit of a priority.  We need to move off the third party components we use, which isn't a huge percentage of the available components, but it restricts are ability to scale.  Once we do that, scaling a page will be easy.  

You can recover the workspace by reading this post:

 

As for your screen components, if you don't want to put the original monitor back to fix it, you can create a new page, copy all the controls you can see to that page, then switch to the old page and do Edit - Select All to select all the rest of the components which are off screen.  Then use Shift- arrow keys to manually move the controls onto the screen and then you can manipulate them again.  In the latest releases, you can also select off screen components from the workspace under Pages: which lists all the components on any particular page.  Then use the keyboard to move them onscreen.