RE: Support for links and id tags

["Young, Robert" <Robert Young dsto defence gov au>]

> Björn Medin wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I found Dia very useful for making various diagrams
> for publishing on the web. Simply by saving as svg
> and moving to the web. I have manually edited the svg-file
> and added <a xlink:href="link.htm"> for linking. To
> enable later processing I have grouped the objects into
> <g id="234"> groups.
> 
> Is there any support for adding <a> links in Dia. 
> For later processing it would be nice with a id tag
> for the shape objects. 
> 
> Can I have multiple testfields in a shape?
> Just adding a second <textbox > did not do the trick.
> 
> I guess I have to turn to coding to implement part of my
> requirements. Is there any documentation on how to handle
> more complicated shapes libraries?

Linking has been discussed on the mailing list quite often, but never
implemented. Take a look through the archives to see the discussion so far.

As for multiple <textbox> fields, this is currently not possible. If you
look in the objects/custom/ directory you will find the current code for
implementing custom shapes (i.e. ones defined using a subset of SVG). The
shapes are stored shapes/ and the documentation that describes this is in
doc/custom-shapes. 

The objects/custom/ code (i.e. the Custom Shapes plugin) would be the place
to start to add multiple <textbox> fields. If you do decide to implement
this feature (please do!) I'm very keen on being able to name these fields -
that is, each <textbox> field has an optional name or description. For
example, for drawing circuit diagrams there might be a resistor and it has
two <textbox> fields : Value and Reference. This would enable other tools to
extract this information and process it. You may also like to implement
default text so that once can specify a default in the .shape file.

Good luck!

Regards,
Rob.