Bubbles: Show/Hide Properties

Bubble Show/Hide properties determine the timing and conditions for showing/hiding bubbles and bubble anchors. They are managed from the Show/Hide tab of the Properties Pane:

Show

Choose from these options that determine when to show the bubble:

  • After previous: The bubble appears after the previous bubble is closed

  • With previous bubble: The bubble appears along with the previous bubble

Hide

Choose from these options that determine when to hide the bubble:

  • On button click: Hide the bubble when the user clicks one of the bubble buttons (applies to bubbles and anchored bubbles only)

  • With previous bubble: If the bubble is shown with the previous bubble, hide both bubbles at the same time

  • After [X] seconds: Hide the bubble after the number of seconds specified (applies to bubbles and anchored bubbles only)

  • When narration ends: Hide the bubble when the audio narration stops; or, if narration is disabled for the bubble, hide the bubble after the number of seconds specified (applies to bubbles and anchored bubbles only)

  • At the end of this step: Hide the bubble at the end of the current step

  • At the end of step [X]: Hide the bubble at the end of the specified subsequent step (applies to bubbles, anchored bubbles, and tooltips only)

If the bubble is set to hide On button click, this means it has user-controlled timing. All other Hide options apply only to bubbles with robot-controlled timing.

Block Screen

Tick this checkbox to block the user’s entire screen for as long as the bubble is displayed (i.e., the user cannot click anything on the screen around the bubble). During runtime, the user will see a grayed-out screen around the bubble:

This option is available only for bubbles set to hide on button click.

If the bubble is anchored and its highlight box is enabled, the entire screen around the highlighted box is blocked:

Show only if variable is TRUE

Tick this checkbox to display the bubble only if a specific variable's value is True. If the variable's value is False, the bubble is not displayed to the user.

The specified variable would have acquired its value through the application of a logical sequence earlier in the wizard (generally, using advanced commands or Read from screen).

Example

You want a bubble to appear to the end user only if a particular field on the user's screen is empty. (For purposes of this example, let's say that we're checking a form's date field.)

To make this happen, you could:

  1. Determine if the date field is empty by setting the step's core action to read from screen using the Is Empty value type

  2. If the date field is empty, the value True will be returned in the Read from screen variable (let's say that we've assigned this variable the name Date Field Empty)

  3. Add a bubble after the core action and set the bubble's Show/Hide properties to show the bubble only if the Date Field Empty variable has a value of True

Bring window to front

Select an option from the dropdown list to determine whether the robot should automatically activate the window to which the bubble is related:

  • Default: The robot automatically determines whether it should bring the window on which the bubble appears to the front of the screen. If the window has already been brought to the front, the wizard does not attempt to bring it to the front.

  • Always: The robot always attempts to bring the window to the front of the screen. This is useful for preventing cases in which the window might be unexpectedly deactivated by another window that is brought to the front.

  • Never: The robot never attempts to bring the window to the front of the screen. The robot shows the bubble if it detects the window, regardless of whether or not the window is brought to the front.