This wizard allows the creation of custom components that act just like built in components while being created from user designed schematics or state diagrams. This means that once a schematic design is finished a component can be generated from it for use in multiple projects. To start creating a component from a schematic, activate the schematic in the Design Canvas and then select the Generate Component action. The wizard requires two pieces of information from the user, firstly the name that should be given to the component. Interactive Logic automatically sets this name to be a concatenation of the schematic's name and '_c'. The reason for this is that the component to be generated must have a unique name. Feel free to replace this name with any name you desire, as long as the name is not already used by a built in component, schematic or state diagram. Once the 'Next >' button is pressed the second piece of information is requested, namely the new component's category. By default Interactive Logic uses the same category name as that of the source schematic. The difference though is that when the component is generated it will appear under the 'Built in Components' node in the Project Tree, instead of the 'Schematics' node. Feel free to replace the default category with any category name you desire. Click 'Next >' and finally click 'Finish'. The new component will appear immediately under the 'Built in Components' node in the Project Tree ready for use. If for some reason you want to use both the original schematic and the generated component in the same project you may find it hard to distinguish between the two as they appear the same on the Design Canvas. To find out the exact type of a component instance on the Design Canvas right-click on the instance and select 'Properties', the titlebar of the properties dialog that appears will have the type name of the component displayed. This should not be confused with the instance name in the text edit area of the properties dialog. If you want to delete a custom component so it no longer appears under the 'Built in Components' node of the Project Tree you can delete the component description file [ComponentName].hilcomp using a file manager and then restart Interactive Logic. All generated components are placed under the directory [Install Directory]\Data\Components\UserDefined where [Install Directory] is the directory you selected to install Interactive Logic into during the install process. This is typically 'C:\Program Files\Interactive Logic'. It is important to note that if you have projects that use a component that has been deleted then when these projects are opened the component instances will no longer be present in the design. |