AVEVA Plant SCADA

In the (legacy) Graphics Builder, groups are used for 2 main things:

1. Applying dynamic properties to multiple objects

2. Keeping multiple objects together when moving/sizing, or making it easier to select multiple objects that are on top of or behind other objects.

For either case, you often have to add/remove objects to the group, edit the properties of individual objects, or move individual objects. This requires ungrouping the objects, making changes, then regrouping the objects (I know there are work-arounds to edit object properties without ungrouping).

Grouping and ungrouping is easy enough to do with the new keyboard shortcuts in addition to menus and toolbars. That is fine for case #2, but for case #1, you end up losing and having to re-create any dynamic properties. Worse, you might not even realize there were any group properties defined (and now lost).

It would be nice to be able to unlock the group to move/edit/add/remove objects, then relock it without losing group properties. This would also help if the layout of the page makes it hard to select all the correct objects to regroup them. Maybe the rest of the objects on the page could be grayed out or the group could be shown on a patterned background like when editing genies to make it obvious what's in the group and that you need to re-lock it before editing anything outside the group.

Another option would be to put the object coordinates, x and y scales, and mirroring into the object's properties dialog. That would allow you to manually edit an object's size/position without needing to ungroup. That would also be useful for fixing text, genies, symbols, etc. which have been stretched out of proportion and don't look right.

However, I realize there will likely be few enhancements to the legacy graphics builder since Industrial Graphics are now available to a limited extent. A simpler enhancement would be to at least warn users if they try to ungroup a group that contains group properties.