Feature Request (or is it a bug workaround): Swimlane Lock

General Questions/Discussions
1

Hi all

Many of us are getting frustrated at the behaviour of the pools / lanes when attempting to select model elements contained within. Trying to drag a selection box around shapes is very frustrating as this instead results in the swimlanes themselves being moved around!

I know that there is a “Selectable” attribute to pools and lanes which can help with this, but there are some problems:

  1. It’s tedious to use this (have to remember to mark both the lane and corresponding pools as non-selectable
  2. It doesn’t work half the time! You mark it as not selectable… and sometimes it still insists on dragging the lane / pool around when you mean to drag the shapes within!

Although I would really like to see this behaviour fixed (which may be hard since it sometimes works, I am asking you to consider adding a new feature (hopefully with a toolbar or pallette button): Swimlane Lock. This feature could toggle on / off the “selectability” of all pools and lanes (or maybe display a dialog asking for which to toggle, or “all”). This would be handy for the user as they could quickly toggle on or off this behaviour, instead of having to click on the appropriate lanes and pools (in whatever magical order is required to make it work!) and toggle the “selectability” option manually.

Or alternatively, you could find out why the “selectability” option doesn’t always work… :frowning: Still, I for one would like an easier way to achieve the same thing… if my idea above isn’t viable I’d be happy to discuss other options.

Thanks

2

Hello Cameron,

Thank you for your post. I just have a quick try. I guess I that know why the selectable sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t. When right-click on a lane to make it non-selectable, the lane itself will become non-selectable, but the pool is still selectable and movable. When moving a lane, it ‘think’ that you are moving the pool, so the pool and the lane(s) within move together. I will report to our engineers about this behavior.

I think that you comment is valuable. We can perhaps provide a diagram based switch to let user make all pools and lanes selectable/non-selectable. But this is just my thoughts. Let me talk to our developers. I will come back to you as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Jick

3

Hello Cameron,

The latest release has the bug fixed. Now, when you make a lane non-selectable, its parent pool would be made non-selectable as well. Please run the product updater to advance to it. You can find the updater inside the bin folder of the bin folder of VP Suite.

Best regards,
Jick

4

Thanks Jick… I’ll give it a try!

5

Hello Cameron,

You are welcome. Just for your information, we planned to support a direct way of making models of the same type to become selectable/non-selectable. This will probably helps you lock/unlock all the pools in the diagram, and make it easier in working with the shapes inside the pools. Thanks to your suggestion.

Best regards,
Jick