Designer

Classic Servoy
1

The form designer in 4.1 is still not as advanced as in 3.5.x. There’s a number of “features” in 4.1 that reduces form design efficiency:

  • copy and paste of objects: the location of the pasted object no longer pastes to the offset of the original object. this results in pasted objects being very hard to find sometimes. the pasted object is also always on the default grid (again, instead of an offset of the original object).

  • selecting objects is buggy. for example, select a bunch of objects and move them. this only works sometimes – sometimes it will instead resize all the objects. other times, it will lose the entire object selection and only move one object.

  • please bring back the two “step size” modifiers. 3.5 had 10px and 20px increments.

  • can’t find short cut keys for “bring to front” and “send to back”

  • form designer is not as responsive in serclipse as i’m used to in 3.5.x.

  • all along we’ve thought this was mac-specific serclipse issues. we just tested with serclipse on windows though and all the issues seem to remain.

All of these little things added together is annoying enough for us that for complex form creation we actually still use 3.5.x and then import into 4.1.

2

Hi David,

Regarding copy&paste:
Copied objects are pasted to the last-click-location, if you want we could implement the old-style as an option (feature request).

About the 2 step-size modifier: we dropped on because of the key-binding conflict.
What key-combination do you propose?

We can add the bring-to-front/sent-to-back key shortcuts, please create a feature request.

Regarding form editor responsiveness, we have made quite a number of performance improvements for it a couple of months ago.
Maybe you can send us an example of a form that is is slow to edit and we can analyse performance for it.

Rob