Understanding Why There Is No Undo Button
This article explains why StructureGram doesn't have an Undo button so that you can understand how the app handles your data and get the most out of its layout tools.
Why No Undo?
If you've made a manual change to a diagram and gone looking for Undo, we get it — it's a natural reflex, and not finding it can be frustrating. Most diagramming tools treat diagrams like documents: a canvas you edit freely, with Undo as your safety net. StructureGram works differently, and that takes a little getting used to.
In StructureGram, your diagram reflects live data: every entity and relationship you see is real, and any change you make is saved immediately.
That creates a problem for Undo. If you move an entity on the diagram and then undo the action, should StructureGram also undo changes you made to that entity's data? What if you only wanted to undo the visual change? These two things — the data and the appearance — are tightly connected, and unpicking them reliably isn't straightforward.
There's also a collaboration dimension. StructureGram is a multi-user application, and your team may be working in the same Group at the same time. An Undo action that rolls back shared data could create conflicts or overwrite changes made by someone else — without either of you realising it.
What We Offer Instead
StructureGram's auto layout is designed so that you rarely need to move things by hand. When you create or update a diagram, the layout engine arranges your entities and relationships automatically, producing a clean structure diagram without any manual repositioning.
The trade-off is intentional: StructureGram prioritises getting you to an accurate, well-structured diagram quickly over giving you fine-grained control of a canvas. For most diagrams, auto layout gets you there without any manual edits at all.
If you do need to adjust the layout, you can move entities and edit relationship lines manually — but those changes are saved as you make them, and there's no way to reverse them.
How to Get Back to a Clean Layout
- Rebuild any part of the diagram at any time. Once you've changed something by hand, the layout status button shows Manual-layout. Open it for three refreshes: Layout rebuilds entity positions and relationship lines, Links rebuilds the lines alone, Labels & sizes returns labels and entity sizing to their defaults. Each is amber when clicking it discards hand-made changes and green when it costs you nothing — so you can see what a refresh will take before you click. See Understanding Auto-layout and Manual-layout.
- There's no separate save step to remember. Manual changes autosave as you make them, so there's nothing equivalent to a "save point" to return to. To keep your manual layout, simply don't refresh; to discard it, use the refresh covering the part you want rebuilt.
Modelling Changes Safely
If you want to try out structural changes — adding or removing entities and relationships — without affecting your live data at all, use a Scenario. Scenarios are sandboxed copies of a diagram where every change is highlighted visually and nothing flows back to your live data unless you choose to apply it. See How to Create a Scenario.