Welcome to SIMUL8 2016. This year we’ve got another great host of features that we’re
really excited to share with you. One of these features that I’ve really enjoyed developing
are the tabs on the simulation window.
What’s so cool about these is that you can show dialogs, spreadsheets, custom reports,
HTML pages and your actual simulation, all within the main simulation window.
Now, this is great because it allows you to create a custom user interface that you can
share with your users, with your stakeholders. Even if their not sim-aware, they’ll still
be able to put inputs into the simulation, run it and see the results all in one window.
Here is a pre-built simulation.
We want to share this simulation with our colleagues, but as they’re not familiar with SIMUL8,
we want to create a user interface which allows them to easily navigate to the key parts of the simulation.
This includes the data inputs, the simulation itself, results and different scenarios.
We can do this using the new tabs feature in SIMUL8 2016 which is located on the 'Insert'
tab on the far right hand side.
Adding tabs to your simulation is easy and you can add as many as you want. To add a
tab simply click ‘New’ and a new tab will appear in the list box on the left hand side.
You can rename your tab by entering text in the name box.
Once you have named your tab you must then associate the tab with the SIMUL8 feature
you want to display. In this case let’s choose simulation which will display the entire simulation window.
You can use a tab to display any SIMUL8 dialog, show the simulation window where your simulation
is built, a custom report or any SIMUL8 spreadsheet.
The first tab we’ve created is the 'Simulation' tab, so users can navigate back to the simulation.
You can see this has now appeared in the top left hand corner of the screen.
Now let’s repeat those steps but this time add a ‘Data Inputs’ tab.
We will rename the tab ‘Data Inputs’, this is stored in a spreadsheet. So let’s connect this
tab to the correct spreadsheet using this dropdown.
You can also change the order of your tabs.
We want to create a wizard for experienced users so I want the ‘Data Inputs’ to be at the top.
You can now see that the 'Data Inputs' tab has appeared in the top left of the simulation window.
Users can now navigate quickly to this and change parameters in the spreadsheet.
You can click between the tabs to view the spreadsheet and the simulation window.
Now let’s give users quick access to the simulation results. Let’s add a third tab and call it ‘Results’.
With this you can either display a custom report or a spreadsheet, in this case our
results are in a spreadsheet.
Again, we’ll use the dropdown to select the correct spreadsheet from the dropdown list.
This ‘Results’ tab is now on the left hand side, giving users quick and easy access to the simulation results.
Like before we can now navigate smoothly between the tabs.
Users can also scroll in the spreadsheet if there is a larger spreadsheet to display.
Finally, we want to give users the ability to test scenarios quickly, so let’s add
a ‘Scenarios’ tab that lets users control the number of winding stations in this simulation.
We’ve already constructed a simple SIMUL8 dialog called ‘Winding’ that controls
the simulation logic to do this.
Another great addition to SIMUL8 2016 is that we can now control the appearance
of SIMUL8 dialogs through HTML.
Once you have created your dialog selection controls, there is an option
on the bottom right hand side of the dialog to apply HTML content.
Before selecting this option you must first create an HTML file
to control the formatting and data in the simulation.
You can find detailed instructions on how to do this in the SIMUL8 help files.
Once you have created your HTML file, check the HTML content box and navigate to the correct file.
This dialog will now display as it would in a web browser.
Now we need to connect this dialog to a tab so it can be displayed in the simulation window.
Navigate back to the ‘Tabs’ menu on the ribbon.
Let’s call the fourth tab ‘Scenarios’,
this time we’ll select the dialog option and select the correct dialog from the drop down list.
Once we hit ‘OK’ we’ll see that a new tab has appeared.
We can now select this tab and the HTML content of the dialog appears in the simulation window.
We’ve connected the HTML to a SIMUL8 global variable so users can change the number of
winding stations. Let’s increase the number of stations to 6, once we leave the dialog,
the logic is triggered. Back in the simulation we can now see the number of winding stations
has increased to 6. If we go back to our ‘Scenarios’ tab and enter 4, the simulation automatically
updates the number of winding stations.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed this quick introduction on how to use SIMUL8 tabs and HTML dialogs.
It’s a fantastic feature set that allows you to create beautiful user interfaces quickly
which is important when you are sharing your simulation amongst colleagues or customers.
We’re looking forward to seeing what wonderful creations our SIMUL8 users come
up with when including these features in their new simulations.