Visual group can not be in front of its notes

[romualdrichard]

Version of Archi

5.2

Operating System

Windows

Expected Behaviour

I have several notes in my view. I put these notes in a visual group. Everything is ok. I set the group to be in the Front of the notes and set its color opacity to 0. I expect that when I click on the group I get the group since it's in the front (useful for moving notes...)

Workaround Select all the notes and move them. Grouping is useless in this case

Actual Behaviour

When I click on the group, I get the note instead of the group.

Steps to Reproduce the Behaviour

1. Put some notes in a view
2. Put these notes in a visual group
3. Set the group to be in the front
4. Click on a note in the group, you get the note, note the group

[Phillipus]

This is the usual and expected behaviour. The Group is a container and the notes inside the Group are child objects. Setting the Group to be in front will not set it in front of its child objects, only its sibling objects that share the same container (usually the diagram View).

[jbsarrodie]

Some comments:

Workaround Select all the notes and move them. Grouping is useless in this case

You don't have to select all the notes, you have to clic on the group itself (e.g. on its name) and move it.

I expect that when I click on the group I get the group since it's in the front (useful for moving notes...)

Visual Groups in Archi (and most ArchiMate modelling tool btw) don't work like the grouping feature of software like PowerPoint. You don't "group" the individual objects to create a "composite" object, you simply create a container in which other objects will sit. Moving the group obviously moves the objects in it at the same time, but clicking on an object will select that object, not the underlying group.

[jbsarrodie]

@Phillipus this remind me some discussion we had some years ago in Amsterdam: it would be nice to have a feature in ArchiMate views to "lock" the view or part of its content, the same way we can lock an object in a canvas view. For objects acting as a container, we could have a "lock content" option which would not lock the container itself (it could be updated or moved around), but its children. If implemented, this would offer a good substitute to "PowerPoint like" grouping, by making sure people don't move children of a grouping while they simply want to move the group itself.

[romualdrichard]

That's this kind of behavior :)