Description

In the same way you can group elements of a PowerPoint slide, you can group Intuiface assets together. This is particularly helpful when you want to aggregate assets into a logical or functional superset. Whenever the group is moved, resized or duplicated, all the contained assets will act together - that is, their spatial relationship and relative size is maintained. (If you want items to be "grouped" but to be individually movable/resizable, see the Pinboard collection.)

Uses include:

• Interactive product data sheets. Add combination of text, image, video and document assets. Populate on the fly with content using Interface Assets. Every time the data sheet is moved resized, all embedded content reacts accordingly.
• Interactive maps. Place an image of a map in a collection and place point-of-interest markers on top of specified locations. Movement and zooming of the group won’t disturb marker placement.

How It Works

To add Intuiface assets inside a group you have three options:

1. Select a group in the active scene then choose any asset type in the Asset panel and drag-and-drop any item from the Content Library on top of the group while pressing the Alt key on your keyboard .
2. Add an asset to the active scene and then drag its representation in the Scene Structure panel on top of the representation of a group.
3. Select multiple items in the scene, right-click any one of those items and select the Group menu option.

The order of Group content in the Scene Structure panel determines their depth relationship. The first child of a Group in the Scene Structure panel is the lowest item - the deepest - in that group. The last item in the Group is the highest.

To edit Group content - to reposition, resize or configure individual assets - double-click the Group container in the scene. Everything outside of the Group inherits a stripped background and you now have access to each individual asset within the group. (You can also select individual elements using the Scene Structure panel.)

NOTE: The top left corner of the Group is the reference point for X,Y coordinates of all items located inside. This top left corner has the coordinates X=0, Y=0.

Resizing Options

Once an individual asset has been incorporated into a group, its Container property inherits new possible values. This property determines which behaviors are exhibited when a user interacts with the group at run time. The three possible values for the Container property are:

1. Scale --> Global scaling is performed on the asset, meaning even control buttons for a video asset or font size of a text asset grows or diminishes proportionally with the group size modification.
2. Resize --> The size of the container for the asset varies proportionally with the group but the control buttons for a video asset or the font size of a text asset are unaffected. Use of the Resize option is equivalent to direct manipulation of an asset using its blue resizing handles.
3. No resize --> Assets embedded in the group are unaffected. Only the container size of the group itself varies. All assets contained in the group maintain a proportional distance from the group's central anchor point. Thus, if you zoom out the group, embedded assets will give the impression of radiating out from the center of the group.

In Edit Mode, using any of the Group's blue resizing handles to increase or decrease its size it will cause all contained items to resize as defined above. For example, a Text Asset container will increase or decrease in size but the font size will remain unchanged.

Properties, Triggers & Actions

Limitations

• Using Actions to resize a Group with non proportional size, will not have the expected result for the items nested within. In other words, the re-size action should keep the proportions of the Group.
• Groups will not correctly resize when using Width/Height bound properties to another asset when manipulating the binding target.