# animations and animate elements

Animation defines how you want an object to behave at run time. Object animation associates objects with tags or expressions so the appearance or movement of an object changes to reflect changes to a tag or expression value.

Animation for sliders is controlled by a single tag. For other forms of animation, define an expression to control the object's changes in appearance or position.

## The animations element

The animations element is nested within the graphic object element.

## The animate elements

The animate elements are nested within the animations element.

Groups and drawing objects have the following animate elements: animateColor, animateFill, animateHeight, animateWidth, animateHorizontalPosition, animateVerticalPosition, animateRotation, animateHorizontalSlider, animateVerticalSlider, and animateVisibility.

Exceptions are the rounded rectangle object, with no animateRotation element, and the image and panel objects, which contain only the animateVisibility element.

All other objects have only the animateVisibility element.

If more than one animation is defined, the animations must be defined in the following order (though animations may be missing from the list):

- animateVisibility
- animateRotation
- animateWidth
- animateHeight
- animateHorizontalPosition
- animateVerticalPosition
- animateHorizontalSlider
- animateVerticalSlider
- animateFill
- animateColor

## See also

Graphic display XML file elements and attributes

Graphic display XML file structure

Graphic display XML schema