How to Manually Edit a Diagram
This article explains how to manually edit a diagram so that you can adjust the layout to suit your needs.
Auto-layout produces a clean diagram in most cases, so manual edits are usually minor. The most common adjustments are moving entities and tweaking relationship lines.
Before You Start
You'll need an existing diagram open. If you don't have one yet, see How to Create Diagrams.
Quick Steps
- To move an entity, click and drag it to a new position on the canvas.
- To move a relationship label, click and drag it to a new position.
- To edit how a relationship line connects two entities, click Edit Links.
- Hover over a relationship line — black dots appear indicating bend points.
- To remove a bend point, drag it over another bend point to merge them.
- To add a bend point, click any point along the relationship line where there are no existing bend points.
- Once you've finished editing relationship lines, click Edit Links again to stop using them.
- To resize an entity, select it and drag one of the handles on its edge.
There's no separate save step — each change autosaves as you make it. See Ownership Diagram Auto-Save.
What You'll See
As soon as you move an entity or hand-edit a link, the layout status button in the toolbar changes to Manual-layout. That's your confirmation the change is preserved — it stays that way until you explicitly ask StructureGram to recompute the layout. See Understanding Auto-layout and Manual-layout.
Tips
- Move and resize entities before editing relationship lines — it's much easier to adjust lines once the entities aren't moving around. Resizing an entity redraws the lines that meet it, so doing it first saves redoing that work.
- A line you have shaped by hand keeps its shape when you resize the entity it connects to — only its ends move to meet the new edge. Lines you haven't touched are redrawn around the new size.
- Blue alignment guides appear while you drag entities to help them line up cleanly with their neighbours. They snap the entity into position within a small tolerance, so you don't have to nudge pixel-by-pixel. See Diagram Alignment Guides for how to turn them off if you prefer.
- To go back to the auto-generated layout at any time, open the layout status button (now showing Manual-layout) and click Refresh ▸ Layout. To rebuild only the relationship lines and keep your entity positions, use Refresh ▸ Links instead.