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Wish: The ability to lock a shape

Renso J

Sometimes when designing a view I accidently drag a shape (that is for instance at the back of an object) away. It would be nice to 'lock' a shape in place to make sure it does no unintentionally move.

4

Comments

9 comments

Date Votes
  • MG || Gemeente Tilburg

    Good one, this would also make it possible to drag a rectangular shape when you want to select all the objects within. Right now, I sometimes want to draw this recangle, but all its corners are on another object, making it impossible to multi-select. CTRL+Hold+SelectAllObjects works, but this might be cumbersome.

    2
  • Lars Reeker

    Renso J, thank your for sharing this Product wish. Could you propose your ideal way of 'locking' a share or group of shape? With a keyboard shortcut? Or a lock button in the toolbar? Do you need a visual indication when a shape is locked or not? This really helps us in designing and developing this feature in the future!

    Tarcan Yonel, what do you think of this?

    0
  • Renso J
    Edited

    Lars Reeker / Tarcan Yonel

    Sure, thanks for asking for my input.

    I think the most intuitive way of locking a shape is by right clicking the object and selecting a lock / unlock option from the context menu. The lock state of a shape can be indicated by a (semi-transparent) lock icon in the lower right corner of the object.

    As a fan of keyboard shortcuts, I would love to also have one of these for it. Ctrl+L would be nice (if not already taken of course)

    An additional button in the toolbar would not be something I would opt-in to. This will break my 'flow' too much because I would have to navigate to the top of the screen and then back to the spot on the canvas where I left.

    With regards to the suggestion @MG made:
    It would be helpful if locked objects are disregarded when selecting multiple objects with the mouse drag select.

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  • Lars Reeker

    Great description, thanks Renso J. It helps us designing and developing great features for BlueDolphin!

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  • Renso J

    You're welcome!

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  • Tarcan Yonel
    Edited

    Thank you for your valuable feedback and suggestion Renso J.
    I will definitely keep this request in my mind when I offer new suggestions for improving our UI and usability.
    Appreciated.

    Yours sincerely

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  • Roeland Loggen

    I too support this change. 

    We have created multiple templates for certain types of views. Architects and other users use these templates to create a workset. We want to support them to keep the template clean. A locking (which can be overrided!) mechanism would be a great means to prevent them from by accident moving/deleting/resizing background shapes and having to restore them.

     

     

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  • Erwin Dral

    Hi Roeland Loggen

    now that we have introduced 'opacity' of objects and shapes, you can achieve your goal of 'locking' an area of a view by putting a shape with opacity 0 (iow, completely invisible) on top of them. Please try this out and let us know what you think. 

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  • Renso J
    Edited

    Erwin, nice suggestion for a workaround but this is not in the spirit of my initial suggestion and will create additional problems.

    With this workaround I must add (and therefore maintain) something extra to a view that has no business value to achieve a simple goal. This is only clear for the person that used the workaround, a different user does not know this workaround is in place will be flabbergasted why the software won't work like he expects and sees in other views, mainly because he cannot see that there is something blocking his actions.

    For me, locking is something different that still cannot be achieved with the current feature set and not by using this workaround.

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