Never feel bad about workarounds! The caveat we always give with them is that they aren’t guaranteed to work forever and in all cases as they aren’t supported features, but at the end of the day if you get your project working that’s always a good feeling.
I think that we’re talking about two different types of event/action systems. Your screenshot comes from this section of the Automation Studio Help:
This section describes how to link the widgets within your compound widget together. You said you created a 0 by 0 rectangle in your widget. You can bind the visibility of that rectangle (or rather the VisibileChanged event) directly to the action of another widget within your compound widget. The event is triggered within your compound widget and the action takes place within your compound widget. In this case no OpcUa bindings are possible, but they also aren’t needed because you aren’t doing anything with PLC variables. The information never needs to leave the widget so to speak.
However, you can also “import” events or “export” actions between the widget and other widgets or process variables using these sections of the Automation Studio Help:
If you create a BOOL variable within Automation Studio, and expose that variable over OpcUA, you can use it to trigger actions on your compound widget. Note that this requires you have an external PLC variable available. This is what I did to get my example to work.
I’ve attached my example here in case it helps you. It’s by no means polished but it turns the snippets I posted before into actual code.
TestBinding.zip (156.4 KB)
Hopefully this clears things up. I’m sorry if I lead you down the wrong path due to not completely understanding what you were trying to do, but it sounds like you got something working.