Form Collection
A Form Collection object consists of several forms, or panes, presented in a main form. In this example, there are four forms that appear as tabs in a single main window.
There are four different layout options. From the Type list, choose between:
•
Tabs, the default setting, which displays the forms using tabbed panes.
•
List, which displays a list to the left of the form panes, where you can select the form to display.
•
Sections, which displays each form in a separate section.
•
Tiled or tabbed, which displays the forms in one of two ways depending on the value of a Boolean variable. For more information, see the description later in this section.
In the Forms section you can select which forms to display in the Form Collection. These will be displayed in the app in the order they appear in the list. You can change the order by clicking the Move Up and Move Down buttons.
The Default form list specifies which form to be shown by default. This setting is not available for the option Sections.
In the table below the tree in the Forms section, you can use checkboxes to select which forms should be Visible, Collapsible, Vertically Scrollable, or Expanded. The availability of these options depends on the Type, as shown in the following table:
Type
Visible
Collapsible
V. Scrollable
Expanded
Tabs
Yes
 
Yes
 
List
Yes
 
 
 
Sections
Yes
Yes
 
Yes
Tiled or tabbed
Yes
 
Yes
 
When Vertically scrollable is cleared, the form will never have a vertical scrollbar. Instead, scrollbars will appear on form objects inside the form, if possible.
You can control which tab (or list entry) is active by linking to a string variable in the section Active Form Selector.
The string variable needs to be equal to one of the form names in the form collection, such as temperature or conversion in the example above. Otherwise, it will be ignored.
If you change the value of the form selector activePlot in the above example, in a method that will be run at some point (a button method, for example), then the form with the new value will be activated, as shown in the example below.
activePlot=”conversion”; /* Activate the conversion form on completion of this method */
For a form collection with the Type set to Sections, the Active Form Selector has no effect. Using an Active Form Selector is optional and is only needed if you wish to control which tab is active by some method other than clicking its tab. To remove a string variable used as an Active Form Selector, click the Clear source toolbar button under the tree.
The Tiled or tabbed option displays the forms in one of two ways depending on the value of a Boolean variable used as source in a Tiled or Tabbed section at the top of the Settings window.
The tabbed mode is identical to a form collection with the Type set to Tabs. In tiled mode, all the forms are shown simultaneously in a grid. The layout for the tiled mode can be controlled by the settings in the subsection Tiled mode settings.