Hi everyone,
As more and more users have begun taking advantage of Axure RP 8’s new and improved widget groups, there has been some confusion about how widgets in groups are treated by certain interactions. Specifically, a number of users have been hitting snags with push/pull interactions.
As a quick refresher for those of you who may not be familiar with how push/pull functionality works: The three “Show/Hide” actions and the “Set Panel State” action all offer the option of pushing/pulling other widgets on the page as the targeted widget is shown/hidden or changes states:
When this option is checked, any widgets in the target widget’s push/pull path will be affected. A widget is considered to be in the path if:
-
(For push/pull **right**) Some part of it falls between the pushing/pulling widget's top and bottom edges' Y values, and its X value is greater than or equal to the X value of:
- the left edge of a hidden widget being shown (push) OR - the right edge of a shown widget being hidden (pull) -
(For push/pull below) Some part of it falls between the pushing/pulling widget’s left and right edges’ X values, and its Y value is greater than or equal to the Y value of:
- the top edge of a hidden widget being shown (push)
OR - the bottom edge of a shown widget being hidden (pull)
- the top edge of a hidden widget being shown (push)
Unlike widgets inside of dynamic panels, widgets inside of Axure RP 8 groups exist at the page level, and push/pull interactions evaluate each grouped widget separately. As such, if one widget in a group is in a push/pull path but the rest of the group’s widgets aren’t, that one widget will get pushed/pulled away from the rest of the group.
If you find this happening in your prototype, a good workaround is to ungroup the widgets and place them into a dynamic panel instead. (A quick way to do this is to select all of the widgets, right-click the selection, and select “Convert to Dynamic Panel”.) This will ensure that all of the widgets get pushed/pulled together.
If you’re running into something like this with an accordion menu — e.g. gaps appear between accordion items — change the order of your interactions to ensure that any “Hide” actions come before “Show” and “Toggle Visibility” actions. For an example of this, check out this thread: http://www.axure.com/c/forum/ask-newbie-question/20279-multi-level-accordion-rp8.html#post63943
Hopefully this clears things up. If anyone has any questions, feel free to post them here or to shoot us an email at support@axure.com.