Page History: Elements
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Page Revision: 2014/05/19 00:55
Description
Elements in EventIDE are core objects that carry out specific practical subtasks in an experiment. For example, there is an element that render images, another element that plays videos or another one that collects eye-tracker data. The elements can be added into a particular, or parent,
event. Most of the elements operate only in a scope of the parent event: for example, if you use the Button element, it only detects button presses while the parent event is active. Fewer elements operate in the global scope of the entire experiment but, they still have some parent event as a nest.
The concept of the elements is what makes EventIDE so flexible. Elements performs their functions completely independently, even if they belong to the same type. It means that you can always add, remove or replace a particular element, without breaking the rest of experiment's logic. If you have some experience with programming, you can always create your own elements that extend or enrich functions available in EventIDE.
Property interface
The scope of the event includes all events in event's sublayer, so if the parent event with a Button element has a sublayer with several sub-events, then the Button element will detect button presses in all sub-events. It's, therefore, important to find a proper parent event (and scope) for every element that you are planning to use.
Practical Use
All elements have the named
properties that describe a current status of the given element. For instance, the Renderer element has properties named Size and Location that determine it displacement on the screen. The properties can be changed for each element independently, at the design-time, in order to tune an element before an experiment run. The properties of the selected element(s) are accessible by the
Properties panel in GUI.
Being converted to Parameters, most of the element properties can be also accessed and changed at the runtime, by accessing them as variables in code snippets.
Elements can be added to event from the main menu by clicking the Event – Add Element item. A list of available elements will appear as it is depicted in Figure 1 below.
When you choose and double-click on an element, it will be added to the event, currently selected in GUI.
Figure 1: Available elements that can be added to a particular event.
Elements that belong to a particular parent event are listed in the Elements panel when the event is selected in GUI. All elements that were added in experiment are also can be views in the Element Panel when the HQ Layer is selected. There they are grouped by element type.
Standard Element List ¶