HB theme: Controls out of sight

Steve Horn · Post by **Steve Horn** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 6:23 pm

I opened a ticket on this with Meedio Support but they havent assigned it yet. Does anyone know of a way to delete a control that have been created (actually pasted) on a theme panel but is out of reach for deletion? I copied a couple of buttons from another panel. But after the paste action now the buttons are outside the range of the panel editor and I cannot "reach" them to delete them, move them, etc.

spike5884 · Post by **spike5884** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 9:13 pm

Try using a bigger background. Something like this happened to me. I just switched to a bigger background. I then moved the stuff so that it would be visible and then switched back to the smaller background.

Steve Horn · Post by **Steve Horn** » Wed Jun 01, 2005 11:09 pm

The background the controls are on is 1024x768 as-is. The problem is that I run out of scroll bar movement to get to the wayward controls.. I may have to recreate the panel from scratch, but that was Plan B.

thanks for the idea though

dlmorgan999 · Post by **dlmorgan999** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 12:57 am

Hi Steve,

If you are feeling brave you can edit the panel file directly. It's an XML file and you can edit it with any number of editors (WordPad works fine). I've done this many times in the past to fix issues like this.

Although it's not documented anywhere (that I know of) the internal structure is pretty straight-forward. The panels are called "Skins" in the XML file. Look for the lines that start with "<Skin". On those lines look for the "Name=" section.

When you find the name of the panel containing the unwanted controls you can find those controls and just delete them from the file (the controls are grouped by Buttons, LabelControls, TextControls, etc). It would probably be wise to make a backup of the XML file before you start making changes but I think you won't have any problems.

Once you are done editing the raw XML file you can re-open it in the HouseBot GUI to make sure nothing got messed up. Let me know how it goes.

-- Dave

Steve Horn · Post by **Steve Horn** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 6:14 am

Dave, I thought about doing that; and had even opened the XML and poked around in it. But I did not see anything obvious relating to the wayward controls. I'll look at it again based on your "map". Thanks for the information.

dlmorgan999 · Post by **dlmorgan999** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:54 am

Hi Steve,

Once you find the section containing the type of controls you are looking to remove look for the "Text" section in each line. This is the text that appears on the face of the control. This should allow you to definitively identify the controls you want to remove.

-- Dave

Steve Horn · Post by **Steve Horn** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 8:34 pm

Dave: That did it. I only deleted 1 button by mistake - two buttons with the same name and I picked the wrong one. I could have figured which was the correct one by the x&Y coords, but no big deal. I can add it back in. I appreciate your XML guidance. I need to learn more about it.

dlmorgan999 · Post by **dlmorgan999** » Thu Jun 02, 2005 9:40 pm

I'm glad I could help out. :)