Creating an Animated and Filled Tank Using the Symbol Factory Controls

1. Place an instance of the Symbol Factory Standard Control on a form

2. Bring up the Symbol Factory Standard Control property sheet

3. Select a tank image from the "Tanks" category

4. Click the OK button

5. Place an instance of the Symbol Factory Cutaway Control on the form and position it on top of the tank image you placed on the form.

6. Right click on the Symbol Factory Cutaway Control and select Properties on the menu that appears. This will bring up the Symbol Factory Cutaway Control property sheet.



7. Set the LevelMax and LevelMin properties to match the range of values you will be passing to the control. You may also choose to set these properties from your Visual Basic program using the syntax:

SFCutaway1.LevelMin = double precision integer value

SFCutaway1.LevelMax = double precision integer value

Examples:

Dim dblMyLevelMax as Double

dblMyLevelMax = 5000

SFCutaway1.LevelMax = dblMyLevelMax

Or

SFCutaway1.LevelMax = 5000

Where SFCutaway1 is the name of the instance of the control on the form that you wish to set these properties for.

1. Pass the value representing the tank level to the control in your Visual Basic code using the syntax:

SFCutaway1.Level = double precision integer value

The value you pass should be within the bounds of the LevelMax and LevelMin properties. If you are using a 3^rd party ActiveX control to provide your PLC data communications, many of those controls return data and notify you of new data with an event being fired by that control. A good way to handle updating the tank level would be to put this code to pass the tank level value to the Symbol Factory Cutaway control in the Read Done event handler for your PLC ActiveX control.

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