Set background color (Deprecated) - Workflow Discussion

[depthpicker]

Hello all,

I previously used the command “internal: Button: Set background color” together with the “held for x seconds” to do a short blink to visualise a successful long press action. A super quick workflow.

1. Add 3 actions to “Held for 1000ms section”
   Set background color - $(this:location) - White
   Wait 100ms
   Set background color - $(this:location) - Black

With the new layer system, things got a lot more complicated.

1. create an extra local variable “Longpress”

2. Add 3 actions to “Held for 1000ms section”
   internal: Local Variable: Set value $(this:location) Longpress - set to 1
   Wait 100ms
   internal: Local Variable: Set value $(this:location) Longpress - set to 0

3. In Feedback Tab create action “internal: Variable: Check value” to change colour/style based on the value of my “Longpress” variable.

I´d like to have a Discussion if we could bring back the old way of pushing colours/ style changes from actions directly.
I read a lot in different threads but am having trouble understanding why the new workflow via Feedbacks is the "new and preferred" way of handling Layer style changes.

Thanks for your time.

[Julusian]

I would recommend doing this without the feedback.

Instead in the style editor, you can switch the color field to an expression and put in $(local:mycolorvar)

Then in the internal: Local Variable: Set value actions, you can set them to something like rgb(255,255,255) or whatever colour you want.

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The reason for deprecating the old actions is largely because they predate feedbacks, and encourage a pattern of pushing changes rather than reacting to external state changing.

For your case, yeah it is more effort, but often we find users using these actions to reflect the state of a device they are controlling, which then easily falls out of sync.

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The other reason is that with the new styling, the fixed structure has become a very loose and dynamic structure, so there is no longer a single background color to set.

In theory we could create a new 'internal: Set style color' action, and let you pick which color field to set on which element, but that list is dynamic and really hard to address reliably. And there are dozens of other properties that for consistency would want similar actions, that becomes burdensome to support.

We could either:

1. Reference by exact element and property name, which will cause it to only work on one particular button. It also introduces some complexity in that we need the ui to be able to offer the list of current elements. Not impossible, just a bit fiddly to achieve.
2. Reference element by index. eg 'the 2nd box element'. Simple, portable but breaks if you restyle a button, or want the action to update two very different buttons with a different number of these elements
3. Some way to define a 'tag'/'alias'/'label' for an element, and reference that in the action. Still requires some setup to make it work, and to make sure you keep the tag/alias/label the same everywhere.

Honestly, this is the exact same issue that is unsolved with page numbers that has been a problem since we added the ability to reorder pages. Once we eventually solve one then we could solve the other the same way.