Graphic element definitions are bound to industrial automation data types in an industrial control system. Moreover, a system provides automatic data searching and filtering of an item based on user interactions with either the graphic element definition or a controller data type. Further, a graphic element definition is associated with a data source type information, to simplify configuration of an instance of that graphic element and populate suitable data source fields based on instances of the associated data source type. In addition, a system to automatically generate the graphic element based on data from a logic controller is provided. Moreover, the graphic element can be updated to reflect a change in the data, without a manual refresh.