Text bar widgets

 

This page is related to Data-driven widgets and was updated for Elementi 2025; the information below might not apply for older versions.

Description

Sample Text Bar icon

Text Bar widgets show text using a set number of lines and scrolling from bottom to top and line by line when the whole text doesn't fit in the widget's space. The font size is automatically adjusted for the selected number of lines to fit into the widget area. Depending on the widget configuration, the scrolling effect can also be page-by-page.

These widgets are especially useful when the size of the text is unknown in advance, which is the case when the text is coming from a data source. If multiple text items need to be displayed, the “Text Bar” widget displays them one after another, with or without a transition effect in between.

Text Bar widgets can be found in several folders accessible from "Widgets" tab within the Browse panel:

• “Text Crawlers”, “RSS”, “Text”, “Spreadsheets”, “Calendars”, and “Data Feeds” starting with Elementi 2015
• “Twitter” starting with Elementi 2016
• “Facebook” starting with Elementi 2017
• “Yammer” starting with Elementi 2018
• “SharePoint News” and “Viva Engage” starting with Elementi 2025

Configuration

When the Text Bar widget is opened in Elementi, the following configuration options are shown under the "Properties" tab in the Edit panel:

Text Bar properties

• Data

  Click the button to open the Data Properties dialog and set up the data source.

• Locale

  Select the locale to be used when displaying dates and numbers.

• Text template

  Click the button to configure the template used for displaying the items retrieved from the data source. The template should contain one or more data placeholders (e.g., [[title]]), each having its text style (color, font, bold, italic, etc.). For more details, see the customization example below.

• Horizontal align

  Select the horizontal alignment of the text as "Left", "Center", "Right", or "Justify".

• Transition

  Select the transition effect to apply when switching from one text item to another.

• Looping

  Select whether the widget ends after the last text item or loops to the first one.

• Number of lines

  Enter the number of lines to fit into the widget area. The font size is automatically adjusted for this.

• Duration per line

  Enter the number of seconds each line is displayed on the screen. The initial text slide is displayed for a duration equal to this property value multiplied by the specified number of lines (even when the text fits on fewer lines).

• Scroll duration

  Enter the number of seconds to scroll one line of text. If this is set to 0, then the text is displayed page by page.

Customization

Let's customize the Text Bar widget to display the title and the description of each item from the data source. For that, follow these steps:

1. Click the button to edit the text template.
2. In the "Edit Text" dialog, change the text content to:

   [[title]]
   [[description]]

3. Select the first data placeholder (i.e., [[title]]) and change its font style to bold and its color to blue.

   Any style change must be applied to the entire data placeholder (the whole string, including the square brackets). The font size cannot be manually set because it is automatically calculated by the widget.

4. Click 🆗 button to apply these changes.
5. Increase the number of lines to 8 or more, depending on the actual data source.
6. Click the "Save" button on the toolbar.

Text Bar customization example

For advanced users, see this tutorial about how to disable the automatic calculation of the font size and jSignage.textBar() function.

Troubleshooting

• The following message is displayed: The text bar is set to loop and using it within a schedule or a multiscreen project might cause problems.

  The alert message is usually displayed when the widget is included in a multiscreen project or a schedule file and it is set to loop, which may cause synchronization problems. The solution is to disable the widget's looping property.

  The message can also be received in regular projects, when dragging the project timeline or when any manipulation is done on the feed widget after 12 hours of playing time; in this case, the alert message can safely be ignored.

See also

• Text ticker widgets for continuous horizontal scrolling.
• Text roll widgets for continuous vertical scrolling.
• Slideshow widgets for displaying slides composed of text & media layers, one after another, as a playlist.
• Table widgets for displaying multiple items on the same slide.
• Feed widgets in Elementi 3.x