Issue 118313

Summary: Cannot drag selection pointer over existing element to select objects
Product: Draw Reporter: david.jurgens
Component: editingAssignee: AOO issues mailing list <issues>
Status: UNCONFIRMED --- QA Contact:
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P3 CC: Armin.Le.Grand, issues
Version: OOo 3.3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT Latest Confirmation in: ---
Developer Difficulty: ---
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Description Flags
An example of where the click-drag selection cannot work when clicking inside a layered item none

Description david.jurgens 2011-07-20 06:41:29 UTC 
Created attachment 76705 [details]
An example of where the click-drag selection cannot work when clicking inside a layered item

Normally when clicking and dragging on an open space in a Drawing, a selection rectangle appears (visualized as a dashed line), which enables the user to select one or more elements that fall completely within that range.  However, when there are layers of objects, it is not possible to select by clicking and dragging.  Instead the click and drag behavior selects the background object and moves it.  This seems to violate the principle of least astonishment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment), and is often very frustrating since it involves a manual content inspection to determine how to select the items.  Of course, the user can shift-click on each individual item to group them into a larger selection.  However, for large Drawings with lots of elements, this is very tedious and often prone to missing an item (or selecting the wrong one).  Click and drag selection is by far the easiest way to perform this selection task.

This issue comes up frequently when the user has a background image, or other shape, upon which their items are placed, or for highly layered drawings.
Comment 1 Armin Le Grand 2011-11-02 12:09:04 UTC 
ALG->david_juergens: Thanks for bringing this up, it's seems indeed a little bit strange, but only when You know that the user implies to klick-drag.

When clicking on the blue rect there is no way to detect that the user wants to klick-drag to select the red objects. He also may want to select the blue rect. If we would change this, a lot of error reports would be written which say 'hey, I cannot start to drag my shape with a single click!'.

For that reason there are other possibilities:

- When You need a background shape, move it to where it belongs - on the masterpage

- Hold the Ctrl-Key when starting to select; this will do exactly what You want - no selection and start of drag, but spawning the selection frame starts.

Please reconsider if this is what You needed. If yes, close the task afterwards.
Comment 2 Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 2012-06-13 12:16:35 UTC 
getting rid of value "enhancement" for field "severity".
For enhancement the field "issue type" shall be used.
Comment 3 Marcus 2017-05-20 11:33:17 UTC 
Reset assigne to the default "issues@openoffice.apache.org".