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Documentation?


moff

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hi all,
i've downloaded the trial and the getting started PDF, and am wondering if I've missed a properly manual somewhere? i've had a tinker around and got my first gauge working, but i'm a bit stumped to develop further.

stuff like

  • how can i deploy these things? the creator saves as a PGF, what's that? is it a standalone? (we don't have vista)
  • how's building a template and piping the output from PS into it different from building something in Creator?
  • how do i populate the data of an inner gauge?
  • some complex code examples to learn from too wouldn't go amiss ;)

so am i missing a doc somewhere, or has it not been written yet? if not, can anyone help with the above questions? :)

as you can see from the above questions there are some concepts I don't understand (creator vs templates etc), hence my wondering if I've missed a proper manual, cos everything i've read on this site and the forums seems to take knowledge of these as given. 

it looks to me like a really cool bit of kit, but at the moment it's just a cool toy, to think about using it seriously i need some proper ref to get my teeth into.

 

ta, moff. 

PS mods, you might want to change the default settings for these forums, only showing the last two months' posts makes it looks like there's not much here, and it's not obvious that >2 months old posts are hidden. 

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The PowerGadgets Quick Start Guide (pdf) and the PowerGadgets cmdlets help (chm) are the two pieces of documentation included with the product. We try to explain the product as best as we can in them, but in some cases not everything is clear and feedback like yours allows us to enhance the documenation of the product. I will elaborate on your questions here.

[*]how can i deploy these things? the creator saves as a PGF, what's that? is it a standalone? (we don't have vista) [*]how's building a template and piping the output from PS into it different from building something in Creator?

There are two ways in which PowerGadgets can be used: as cmdlets from PowerShell or through the PowerGadgets Creator.

If you are connecting your gadgets to databases or web services, you can use the PowerGadgets Creator which is a sort of IDE that allows you to visually set the gadgets properties, connect to data, create groups, etc. without the need to write any kind of code. Files created with the PowerGagets Creator (.pgf) contain all the information needed to run a gadget on any computer in which a license of PowerGadgets has been installed, whether a Creator or a Client License (this should answeryour deployment question).

If you need more complex scripting, you can use the PS cmdlets, which opens up a vast array of possibilities since it takes full advantage of PowerShell's capabilities. When using the PowerGadgets cmdlets you can manually set the gadgets properties via scripting (e.g. -Gallery Area) or you can create a template file (.pgt) using a GUI very similar to the PowerGadgets Creator, but which only allows you to set the attributes visually, not data connectivity or groups creation. Once you have created a template, you simply invoke the -template <myTemplate> parameter. Deployment of scripts using PowerGadgets cmdlets also require a PowerGadgets license on the target computer.

[*]how do i populate the data of an inner gauge?

To do so you must use the out-gauge cmdlet and use PowerShell's script blocks. Assuming your data comes from a database and the data you want in the inner gauge is contained in the Column2, you will write this to add an inner digital panel:

out-gauge -InnerGauges_Add Digital -InnerGauges_0_DigitalPanel_Value {$_.Column2}  -InnerGauges_0_Layout_Alignment BottomCenter

You can actually perform operations to the data in the script block. For further details about using scriptblocks with the PowerGadgets cmdlets, please review the following blog posts:

http://community.softwarefx.com/blogs/powergadgets_team_blog/archive/2007/02/02/ScriptBlock-support-in-PowerGadgets.aspx
http://community.softwarefx.com/blogs/powergadgets_team_blog/archive/2007/02/09/Scriptblock-support-in-chart-parameters.aspx

There are other blog posts and support threads that can help you.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

 

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