Tips & Tricks

Entity Selections

...by Single Click

Simply single click on any entity in the map view, or the hierarchy to select it. Its Attributes will be shown in the Attributes Panel

...by SHIFT-Click

In the map view, you can use SHIFT-CLICK to select multiple entities, one at a time.

In the hierarchy panel, you use SHIFT-CLICK to select a contiguous range of VISIBLE entities. They must be visible. If you select a range of collapsed sub-groups, then their children won't be selected unless they're visible as the video clip below demonstrates. (SHIFT key held down while click-selecting)

...by COMMAND-CLICK

In the map view, COMMMAND-Click is the same as SHIFT-CLICK.

In the hierarchy panel; however, COMMAND-CLICK is used to select non-contiguous entities (not adjacent) as shown in the clip below. (COMMAND key held down while click-selecting)

...by COMMAND arrow keys

This key combo is quite powerful and commonly used when something is actively selected. It is designed to quickly select Parent groups or children of groups. Its normally used with only ONE item selected. It will work with multiple items selected, but the results may be confusing. The COMMAND-UP ARROW key combo will select the current selection's PARENT entity if it has one, and the COMMAND-DOWN ARROW key combo, if executed on a Group entity, will select ALL of the current selection's child entities (and DE-select the Parent), but only selects "one-level down". It does not select deeper nested sub-groups.

The video clip below illustrates these effects. With the Objects group selected, the COMMAND-DOWN ARROW key combo is executed, which selects all its children, one of which is another sub-group, Hangers. Note when expanding the Hangers sub-group, its children are NOT selected because as we mentioned, this key combo only selects children 'one-level down' only!

Next, a child element in Hangers is selected and the COMMAND-UP ARROW key combo executed, which selects its parent. The COMMAND-DOWN ARROW key combo is then immediately executed which selects ALL children of Hangers and de-selects the parent.

There are three common uses for this key-combination.

  1. When you select an item in the map view and you do not know where it is in the hierarchy and want to move it to a known group, you can use this key combo to select parent groups and figure out the path to the entity. See Finding Entities .. by Map View Selection

  2. When you have a large number of entities in a group and want to isolate the visibility of only a few of them and turn the majority off. For this you select the parent group, then COMMAND-DOWN ARROW key combo to select all the children, the use the SYNC technique described in the next section to hide all the children (but leave the parent group visible), and then you enable the visibilities of only those entities you want to see. This sounds cumbersome, but is actually quite quick once you get comfortable with the method.

  3. This third use is VERY useful when you have many paths in the map view on top of one another and you are having trouble selecting the path you want. You can use the VERTEX tool to drag a rectangle around a single vertex in the path you want to select, then execute the COMMAND-Up arrow key twice and the full path will be selected.

Sync / Align Attributes

A lot of times, you will want to synchronize or align attribute values between entities. In other words, you want to make a whole bunch of entities have the same attribute value as another reference entity. Perhaps you want to synchronize latitude or longitude values so as to align entities vertically or horizontally in the map view, or you want to enable / disable the visibilities of a large group of entities. You can do this with the ALT/OPTION modifier key when setting attributes. It works very simply like so:

Another example. Lets say you have a Parent Group with 100 child entities and you want to turn off 99 of the child entities and only see the remaining one. Seems simple right? If you turn off the Parent Group, then you cannot even turn on the 1 you want to see (see Scene Management > Visibility and Locking), you must turn OFF the other 99! The solution is to select the other 99, and use the ALT-OPTION key combo to hide any of the selected entities and the others will synchronize their visibilities to match. You can use any of the selection techniques mentioned above to select the items you need to.

A final example. Lets say you've been drawing dozens of Taxi-Lines for the last hour and you realize that the style of the taxi-lines are wrong for all of them and you need to change their style. Again, select all the taxi-line paths you want to change, and in the Attributes panel, change the line style of ANY one while holding the ALT/OPTION key and all the other selected elements will match that change!

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You may have a parent group that have several sub-groups and you want to view one sub-group only and disable the visibility of the other sub-groups. Select all the subgroups, use the ALT/OPTION key to turn them ALL off, then simply turn on the one group you want to see.