Adding content to a state

- Despite the best planning it's inevitable that you'll have to add content to one or more of the states in your MSO. Let's look at how to do that as well as some of the pitfalls you might run in to and how to avoid those. I've got the file add content.indd open from the exercise files. Let's just click on here to select our MSO. And I'll open up the Object's states panel so we can see it. And just going to sort of go through here and I want to draw your attention to the fact that this state does not have the same pins as the rest of the states.

So I want to get these same pins that are going to be used eventually for navigation through our MSO, I want to get those into the state that does not have it. And so, let's click on the state and I'm going to open up my layers panel because I've already saved those pins that we're going to be using, and I've turned off the layer just to start with, but let's turn it on now. There are the pins that I want to get in here. I need to select them all so I'm just going to option click on the layer and that's going to get them selected.

There's a couple of ways I can try and do this. Let's start off with the cut-and-paste method and see how that works. I'm going to use Command X to cut those to the clipboard, and let me just hide the layer's panel here, I'm going to click on the MSO to select it. I've got this state selected that does not have the pins, and I want to get those in there, so let's take a look at the object's states panel. And down at the bottom here you can see this button has a little star in it.

The Tool-Tip is pretty specific there. It says, "Paste copied objects into selected states." Well we didn't really copy it. We more or less cut it, so it's really going to paste any objects that are on the clipboard in there. So let's try it and see what we end up with. And that is definitely not what we want. We've got one here. We've got one here and there's a couple missing. Let's see how we can fix that. I'm going to Command Z, once, and then again to undo that and get everything back to where it was.

Let's try a different method. I still have those pins selected, and now I'm going to Shift, Click on to my Multi State Object. And now I've got everything selected. And let's take a look at that button that was a paste button before. Now that button says, "Add objects to visible state." So let's see what happens if we do that. Now that's much better. If I open up the Layers Panel, we can actually see that that content has all been added and as I select them in here you can see that those pins are now a part of this state in the Multi State Object.

So there you have it. By using Add Content to Visible State you can avoid some of the problems that you'll have with repositioning of content when using paste in to state.