Best Practices - Page Views

Creating Page Views vs a new page allows you to reuse the same graphic assets across multiple views without creating duplicates of the assets as you would when creating a whole new page. This is much more processor efficient.

A good example of this is the Hidden Menu in the standard PV780 Template. The hidden menu view adds the items circled in the image below that are not on the normal System Setting Page View. This is one way to implement menu settings a technician needs to configure the system but keep them hidden from the normal day to day operator. The other option is to implement a password protected menu area which we will cover in another article. That method requires a bit more code whereas this method is very simple to implement.

The basic concept is to use duplicate page views and a sequence of button presses that are reassigned on each duplicate page view until you arrive at the last one in the sequence that takes you to the hidden page that has no other way to navigate to it.

Open up the example built from the PV780 template version 2.9 linked here and follow along. This one has some notes added to the page views to help explain the process.

Go to the Main Menu Layer and open the Main Menu Default view. Notice there are three other duplicate views of the same page. 

The second button down on the right will take you to the first duplicate view called Main Menu View 1. On that page there is another button that takes you to the next view and so on. If you press the wrong button you are taken back to the main view to start all over. Since there is no change in the screen appearance this whole sequence is hidden and the operator has to know the proper buttons to press and in what order. On the last view the third button down takes you to the Hidden Utilities page view that then takes you to the hidden System Settings view(please note the page was named Default System Settings View - poor choice of words, should be called Hidden System Settings View). There is no other way to get to that screen except by navigating through all four Main Menu views. Once you are on the hidden screen you can navigate to as many other screens as needed and only those that know the button press sequence can get there. To exit the hidden page simply assign a button to take you back to the Default Main Menu view or any page view of your choice.

The beauty of this method is there is no code to write, it is quick to implement, and can have as many pages as needed.