Re: Parenting tutorial?

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On 1 Nov 2003, nbeier@tiscali.dk wrote:
> Hello list!
>
> I am still confused about the parenting function.

No wonder, it's all new.

> How come that I can choose to "unparent" or unparent children" on a new
> object? And do it over and over? 

That's because the check for ghosting menu items should (we think) be
fast, and checking all selected objects for parents/children would be
slow for big selections.  It might be overly cautious, though.

> How can I see if a a object has been parented, which one is the parent
> and which ones are the children?

There's really no visual indication of parenting yet, but a child cannot
move outside its parent, and when a parent moves, its child moves with it.

> Has this any influence, if I just use Dia for making drawings, and not
> using the drawing code to generate other code/databases etc.?

None of the exporters know about parenting (yet), but (in 0.92.2) it stays
in the .dia files.  So no influence on generating code/dbs etc.

> How do you actually use the function?  How can I tell Dia which objects I
> want to parent, which one there should be parents and which ones there
> should be children?  eg. must both objects be selected, and does it
> matter which one I right-click on?

Select parent and child together and choose Object->Parent.  Or create the
parent object, and
create new children by dragging from the icons into the parent.

>  Where is the difference between
> unparenting and unparenting children?

Unparent children means that all children of the selected object(s) will be
unparented.  Unparenting means that the selected objects will be
unparented from their parents.

> My "foolish" logic say me that if I have parents and children, the
> separating them and separating the children from the parents would be the
> same!

If both parents and children are selected, the two functions are the same.

> Is parenting for all objects?  Can I mix different objects?

Any object can be a child, even line objects, but only certain objects
(currently UML/Large Package and UML/Component only, but more to come) can
be parents.

> The parenting function may not be the most visible or obvius function in
> Dia, so I suggest that someone who knows the function makes a little
> tutorial. If it walks you through an example of the use of the funtion
> (take this and this object, do that and that to parent them, then you can
> do this and maybe that), then a lot more people will find ways to benefit
> from it.  Maybe it should just be part of the Dia manual.  I wrote all
> the above questions down to show what can go through a mind who are new
> to this parenting (I have used Dia for a few flow charts before, that's
> all)

The above answers should be enough to make an introduction to parenting,
that indeed should go into the Dia manual.  Patches are most welcome.

> Btw. is it me, or is the windows title of todays cvs still Dia v0.92-pre1
> ?  I tried to make a fresh checkout from Dia's cvs into a new directory,
> but there was no configure script, so I tried autogen.sh which gave this
> error:

My bad, I had to rush off after sending out 0.92.2 yesterday, and forgot to
commit.  I've committed it now, and Steffen is working on the Win32
installer.  Anon CVS will update overnight (just missed todays update, I
fear). 

> Otherwise I think Dia is a nice program. My interest is primarily for 
> documenting programs with flow charts and if possible Nassi-Sneidermann 
> diagrams, and who knows, maybe UML diagrams.
>
> Nikolai Beier
> (tries to translate Dia to danish now and then)

You're doing well, only 31 messages to go.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| HĂ„rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
    --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?