There are three ways to select multiple objects on the model. The first one is through the range selection mode, which selects objects whose boundaries intercept the selection rectangle drawn by the user. By default, the range selection is activated by holding the Shift
key and dragging it over the canvas area. To allow the visible rectangle to select objects just release the Shift
and the mouse button. It is possible to change the activation mode of this feature in general settings.
The second way to select a set of objects is through the schema object. In this form, you can right-click the schema's rectangle on the canvas area or a schema item on the model objects widget and select the Select children
action causing all graphical objects under the same schema to be selected.
The third way to select a set of objects is by using the Select all
action when right-clicking a blank portion of the canvas. In that case, it's presented to the user what kind of graphical objects should be selected.
This feature allows the user to select multiple table children like columns, constraints, triggers, indexes, rules, and policies by holding Ctrl + Shift
and clicking the desired elements on any table. This also applies to items on views and foreign tables. The real usefulness of this feature is to perform operations like copying, duplicating, pasting, cutting, and deleting all selected objects instead of doing them per object. This can improve the user experience on the design view. Of course, there are some drawbacks here: depending on the kind of objects selected or the option chosen during some operations the result may differ a bit compared to the operations performed over a single item.