Show Object When

March 30, 201411 yr

One of my favorite features in 13 is by far the Hide objects feature so that you can hide an object when certain conditions are met.

The results save hours of countless other workarounds that we've employed in the past, such as hidden tab panels. or making text 500 points or 1 point and try to get it to blend in to the background.

It's taken me while to articulate an issue I have had when working with this feature.

We know the string that you enter will be evaluated to a boolean result and

TRUE or 1 will indeed hide the object
FALSE or 0 (Zed for those outside the States ) will show the object.

This is just fine for most objects, but I have found that many times the object being hidden may be a calculation or may also have a fair amount of formulas for conditional formatting to display properly.

The string(s) being evaluated on these items tend to be written in the POSITIVE or OPTIMISTIC mindset - for example; an object is placed on the layout and the invoice status is paid make it GREEN.

However you have to do a mental flip to make the object invisible / hidden when the invoice is NOT paid. Hide Object When [ invoices::status ≠ "paid" ]

So I wrote a very basic custom function that makes this feature a "SHOW OBJECT WHEN"

ShowObject ( when )

not GetAsBoolean ( Evaluate ( when ) )

This wrapper will take your string ( in the positive mindset ) and inverses the result so that your objects will show or hide when the condition is met.

Conditional Formatting:

invoice::status = "paid" | FILL GREEN

Hide Object When:

ShowObject ( invoice::status = "paid" )

I am just now starting to employ this and feel its helped in productivity.

Hope you find this helpful.

Cheers

Stephen