The Play Selector component can be used when you want to change chart values or components on a dashboard without having the user do anything. Some common uses where we need an automatic change of components are listed as follows:
- A company dashboard presented on a large LCD monitor in a company common room; this dashboard will refresh or switch views every 20-30 seconds
- A dashboard at a technical support office that shows information on calls coming in and how they are being handled; this dashboard will change views every 20-30 seconds
In this recipe, we will create a Play Selector component that changes the image every 20 seconds. We can pretend that the images are different dashboards.
Have a set of three images ready on the canvas, and overlay them on top of each other.
- Drag a Play Selector component from the Selector section of the Components window onto the canvas.
- In the Play Selector properties, select Row as the Insertion Type and bind the Source Data to the dynamic visibility rows that are set up in Column A of the spreadsheet. Bind the Destination to cell C2, which will control the image to be shown.
- Go to the Behavior icon of the Play Selector properties and check the Auto Play checkbox. Change the Play Time value to 20 seconds.
- Go to the Appearance icon of the Play Selector properties and set the Transparency to 100%. Also uncheck all the checkboxes.
- On each of the image components, set the Dynamic Visibility status binding on the Behavior icon to the yellow colored destination cell C2 from step 2. The key values will be 1, 2, or 3 depending on which order you want your images to play in. In the following screenshot, we've shown the dynamic visibility example for the first dashboard:
In this example, we use a play selector to control which image is being shown. In each 20-second iteration of the play selector, the next row from the Source Data range will be moved into the destination cell C2. In step 4, we set the transparency of the play selector to 100% because we wanted to hide the play selector but still have it active. Finally, in step 5, we configured the dynamic visibilities of the images appropriately so the correct one shows up as the play selector runs.
To learn how to use dynamic visibility, please read Chapter 4, Dynamic Visibility.