Component Visibility

The visibility of a component is a value between 100 and 10000 that is assigned to the component and used to control its display in Target Designer. This is useful, for example, for showing only those components that can be edited, or for hiding components that should not be removed from a configuration.

Target Designer displays all components that have a visibility equal to or greater than the Target Designer visibility threshold. This threshold can be set to any number between 100 and 10000. The default is 1000.

The visibility of a custom component can be set or changed by using Component Designer. Default visibility is 1000. It is generally recommended that you set macro components to 2000 and the components upon which they are dependent to 500, and set any low level components that should never be removed from a configuration and that cannot be edited to 200. The visibility of pre-defined components cannot be changed.

After a component is added to a configuration, the visibility of that component instance is sometimes forced to a higher number. If a component is editable and has a visibility smaller than 1000, the component instance is forced to a visibility of 1000. If any of the components in the prototype chain of a component has a visibility that is higher than that of the component itself, the highest visibility in the chain becomes the visibility of the component instance. In addition, these rules can combine. So, if the visibility of a component is smaller than 1000 and at least one of its prototypes is editable, the prototype instance and the component instance are both forced to a visibility of 1000. An editable component is a component that includes Component instances are editable in its definition.

See Also

Components | Prototype Components | Macro Components

Last updated on Wednesday, October 18, 2006

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