Patent ID: 8316313

Claim:
A computing device for reducing a number of composite shape sub-elements stored in a runtime memory of a graphical display for the process control system, the device comprising: a processor; a memory; a display; and a composite shape sub-element selection application maintained in the memory and executed on the processor to select a composite shape sub-element for display within a composite shape of the graphical display, the composite shape configured to include a selector shape, a plurality of composite shape sub-elements, and an expression, the composite shape sub-element selection application including instructions for: evaluating the expression at runtime to determine an expression result; executing an array indexing operation to identify a composite shape sub-element within a lookup table using the expression result by matching the expression result to an item within the lookup table, the item identifying the composite shape sub-element and the composite shape sub-element identified from the plurality of composite shape sub-elements; displaying the identified composite shape sub-element within or in place of the selector shape; and removing any composite shape sub-elements not identified by the expression result.