v0.9.2 Summary Chapter 7: Modeling tips and tricks 7. Introduction 7.6. Navigate through canvas area

7.6. Navigate through canvas area

During the design job you often need to translate or even locate objects over the database model. To facilitate this task pgModeler implements some features that enables user to move the canvas area and quickly find the desired objects. One of them is the model overview widget already detailed on chapter 6. The other navigation features available are the panning mode and the canvas area corner moving.

Through the panning mode you can drag the canvas area to any direction, little by little by pressing and holding the mouse left button over blank areas and dragging it. To deactivate this mode just release the mouse button to return to the object selection mode. When the panning mode is activated the cursor is changed to the closed hand icon as shown below.

The canvas corner moving is activated whenever the user has objects currently held by the mouse and this latter is positioned at the horizontal or vertical limits of canvas area. After a few seconds while the mouse cursor stays in the same position the canvas will start to move automatically.

This feature is quite useful when you are, for instance, linking two tables using the relationship creation tool and one of the tables is not visible in the current canvas position. This way you don't need to put the two tables in the visible area in order to link them since the corner move will change the canvas position until you are able to locate the desired object. Both canvas corner move and panning mode can be deactivated or have the behavior changed on the general settings.


Mar 22, 2020 at 11:57