SAPIEN Technologies

In the previous article we mentioned the new Designer Tab:

The new Designer tab helps make the GUI designer easier to discover and use. Each of the editing commands is spelled out and the Preview GUI button is more prominent. For those who are not familiar with the Preview command, it allows you to view the GUI without having to worry about the business logic running.

In addition, we moved the Create Form Template and Control Reference document link to the Designer Tab.

Property Sets

Formerly known as “Styles”, property sets allows you to create and apply a group of properties to existing controls in the designer.

It is a quick and easy method of changing common properties of controls, such as anchoring, font, and coloring.

Control Sets

Control sets are groups of prewired controls, that you can create and insert into the designer. The notable addition to control sets is “Shared Events”.

When you check the “Shared” checkbox next to an event when creating a control set, it will tell the Control Set to share the event over multiple instances of the control set. It does this by first checking if the event already exists, if not then it will insert the event. If it does exist, it will simply use the existing script block whenever a control triggers the event.

The TextBox – Watermark control set in PowerShell Studio 2014 serves as a perfect example as to where you would use a shared event. The script blocks to display the watermark is identical for all instances of the control set, and thus doesn’t make sense to create a new instance of the same event block every time the control set is inserted.

New Control Set

We added a new control set, in the 2014 release:

Button – Menu Button

The “TextBox – Validate IP Address” control set was revamped as well. We will cover these two control set in more detail in later articles.

New Grid Job Template

We added a new grid template, that utilizes the Job Tracker in order to load information without freezing the form. This template works well for those queries that take a long time to run.

Property Panel Reset

We added a “Reset” option to the context menu of the property panel. This option restores the default value of the given property:

Form Thumbnail Previews 

As we mentioned in the previous installment, 2014 now supports previews for your GUI Form files in Windows Explorer.

Stay tuned to the next installment.