trouble with groups

[Springer, Paul]

I'm struggling a bit with groups.

 

Imagine an application which displays multiple "pages", one at a time, each
contained on a card, to an operator. The operator navigates from page to
page using a set of buttons (treated as a group) which looks the same on all
the display pages. So far so good; just create a group of buttons and place
it on each display page card. (I did not set it as background because there
is at least one page with no buttons).

 

Now imagine that you want a different set of buttons for each "kind" of user
(i.e. supervisor, administrator, operator, etc.); some users can see pages
that others can't, and vice versa (assume that inactive buttons are
undesirable). So I thought I would create a different group of buttons (even
though they are copies of buttons in other groups) and try to get the right
buttons to appear depending on who logs in.

 

I am struggling with whether to "place" and "remove" the button groups or
leave them on all pages and use "show" and "hide" (the logistics of that are
cumbersome). I have managed to completely lose a button group by some
unknown mistake, so I decided it was time to ask for advice.

 

If anyone has any tips that might clarify the use of groups it might help a
lot. For instance, should I be using copies of buttons to make up the
groups, or can an object be a member of more than one group at a time? If
so, I would still need to move them around to fill in around missing
buttons. Or maybe I should forget groups altogether and just hide/show/and
move buttons to get what I need.

 

Any insights are welcome - thanks.

 

-Paul