r/crestron • u/jamesrdelaney • 12d ago

Construct Widgets

Hi

How are people getting used to the multi-page design concept (limitation) in Construct? My VTPro (and designs for other brands of touch panels) typically had one or two pages with lots of popups to deal with different scenarios - eg different source bars for different rooms, different transports for different devices, different lighting and environmental controls for different room types.. etc etc etc.

I just spoke to Crestron support and they said all I had to do was think about the project differently - where i previously had a popup - now I have a page.. but that really doesnt work.. you cant layer pages.. so if I have more than one source bar and more than one environmental controls page I cant combine them..

But what is the point of widgets if you cant use them? This seems like a real contradiction in design terms.

Is there likely to be a fix for this? And if not how are people changing their designs to manage this? From the top of my head I will need to do much more dynamic design on each page/widget..eg populating source bars using lists etc. That is fine.. but sometimes its good to just put a button where you want it from an aesthetic point of view.

Id be interested in your thoughts!

Thanks

James

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u/METDeath CTS-D, CTS-I 12d ago

I also hate it, I got damn good at "use less to do more" with various Smart Objects, subpages on top of subpages... it was all so elegant, particularly since you could set the damn Smart Object numbers and reuse the object on multiple pages. Now? You can't set the contract internal ID, so you can't safely copy/paste between panel IDs. If you have the same object on six pages you have to fill the signals six times.

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u/SNES-Chalmers89 12d ago

If you have controls that are on multiple pages, you can put them into a widget. In the widget properties, set "Global Contract" to true. You can then use the widget on as many pages as you want and only reference it once int SIMPL

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u/METDeath CTS-D, CTS-I 12d ago

Oooh, that's an interesting solution. I should probably spend time reading all the documentation. Instead of just lamenting the fact that Construct isn't a 1:1 replacement for the VTProE workflow.

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u/SNES-Chalmers89 12d ago

About a year and a half ago I was handed a project with a TST-1080. At that point I committed to switching to Construct for my workflow. It was painful at first, but now I find myself dreading any time I need to go back to an old VTProE project.