Copying doesn't copy the arrows

[charliedua]

When copying and pasting the nodes the connections between them aren't getting copied.

How to reproduce

1. Create a simple diagram (2+ nodes) with arrows connecting nodes.

2. Multi-Select all the nodes

3. Copy the selected shapes ( optional: and then delete these shapes [ for readability purposes ] )

4. Now click on the Paste button to paste the copied design.

Observation: The nodes are not connected with arrows

Used Chrome with latest master (8e0c0e73b96051b4a9aca4bc3ef033831ecda466) running in a virtualbox docker container.

Not sure if this is the expected behavior or not.

[charliedua]

Upon further research I have found that we are not handling the copy-paste operations ourselves, this is handled by gg-editor here So I am not sure if we can actually fix this 😕

[shtefcs]

That is good research. Well isn't that even better? It means that natively it is supported, but we just didn't do it.

I think this should be doable.

[charliedua]

Thoughts

No that is actually bad. We cannot change the functionality as it is handled by gg-editor. we are only setting the command in this file The rest is handled by gg-editor We can make changes if we try to clone and edit the gg-editor files but I think that would be too much work. IMO we should just leave the copy-paste functionality as is and consider it as a feature, not a bug?

Detailed explanation

• In the file copy.ts line 20 gg-editor is copying the nodes to the clipboard.
• As the arrows are not nodes they are not copied.
• So when we paste from the clipboard the arrows are not pasted.

Slight Possibility

If we still want to do it then ↓

• Some research shows that they are using the command design pattern which makes it easy to add extra commands.
• The BaseCommand interface can be used to inherit and change the functionality of various commands.
• even if we make a class inheriting from the BaseCommand interface we might not find a way to integrate it with gg-editor. (Needs research)

Another Approach

We can also inherit from the copy.ts file to create a deepCopy.ts which has the same functionality but also saves the arrows. This approach has some benefits from the previous one as we are not reinventing the wheel.