Is there anyway to disable a component without reducing the alpha

[Godlike-Productions]

I'm trying to make a whole bunch of modulators display parameters, but I essentially want them read only.

I'm disabling components to do it, but it reduces the alpha of all the modulators making them harder to read.

Is there a way to achieve this?

[Ted-juh]

Disabled, as in not responding to mouse events?

You could create a function for every mouse event you want to disable. For instance, you want to disable the mouseDown:

mouseDownDisabledForThisButton = function (comp, event)
if event then
  comp:setInterceptsMouseClicks(false, false)
end
end

Now the component should not respond to the mousedown event. Rinse and repeat for every component or event. I noticed during testing that it will disable the mouse events in the editor itself, too. Clicking the component won't select it. You should now drag from the side over the component to select it.

[dnaldoog]

That’s a great idea!

I was going to suggest that you could have a transparent uiComponent sitting in a layer above the controls, and then paint a Rectangle object over that control when you disable it. The Rectangle could be painted with a slightly transparent RGBA color or left transparent.

[Ted-juh]

A transparent Custom Component would be sufficient. It would steal focus from the component that is underneath. You just have to make sure it is on top, which is a little bit fiddly in Ctrlr.

[Godlike-Productions]

I tried to disable it on event, but sometimes clicks slip through and change the state before it locks down the component. I'll try some transparent components on a new layer.

[Godlike-Productions]

Also disabling them this way, also disables them in panel development mode, which is a pain.

[Godlike-Productions]

A transparent component on a higher layer may work, but I'd need to enable and disable the layer when I switch tabs, which is doable. I do like the mouse down disable though, that's an elegant solution.

[Godlike-Productions]

Nope, you can't do it on layers, as you can only select things on the top layer, and if you try to move components to lower layers and they are in a group box or tab box they will disappear. Only solution was to make and lock a tranparent component and move it to the top programatically on opening the panel.

[dnaldoog]

Here's one way to do it using uiComponent and a table hide unchecked rows:

Babooshka Freeze Element_1_0.zip

When you select a new tab, you would hide/show the layer containing the masking uiComponents. I haven't implemented that.

[Godlike-Productions]

I'll have to study this in some detail. The layer behaviour in Panel mode is different when panel mode is off. When off, you can't select modulators in deeper layers, but when panel mode is on, it seems you can, which is where I was having issues before. I don't think I tested with panel mode on. I'll look at this tomorrow when I've done the other changes Its getting late here.

Weirdly, when I pressed buttons on this panel, it triggered stuff on my main panel that I had open, which was weird.

I'll send you through the panel when I have fixed the preset tool on the other tab, so you can see what I've done.

I may implement one other feature which will allow the user to store their own list of ID's and Algorithm numbers, so the panel can make automatic suggestions of what to change the Bank and ID's to for both the preset and chain tools, and I need to throw the last used path into the value tree and retrieve it, as well as a table of ID's and Algorithm names. I'm not sure if this will be worth it at this time. This tool only gets used once per chain of preset prior to import. It would take longer to type in the algorithm names than it would to process a whole bank of chains.

[Godlike-Productions]

OK, managed to do it with layers using a uiComponent set to visible

This function is called when a tab value changes.

I'll probably have to call this after modulators are drawn to make sure the layer is synced when panel starts.

toolSelectTabChange = function(--[[ CtrlrModulator --]] mod, --[[ number --]] tabIndex)
if tabIndex == 1 then
    layer = panel:getCanvas():getLayerByName("Mask Layer"):setVisible (true)
else
    layer = panel:getCanvas():getLayerByName("Mask Layer"):setVisible (false)
end --if
end