Once you have placed elements into a diagram you may find you need to manipulate them visually. If you experiment a little you should find this easy and intuitive to do. Most manipulations involve dragging with your pointing device or executing speedmenu commands of selected elements. If you want to know more about some of the common visual manipulations, check the sections below.
You can visually move Node elements into different packages, or members into different classes, by dragging them on top of the destination icon and dropping them. For example, you could drag Classes into a Package (Class diagram), or Components into a Node (Deployment diagram).
You can use the same technique to copy members to different classes and interfaces by pressing CTRL before initiating the drag. When you move an element, it is deleted from the source package or element and moved into the destination package or element. Copied elements are not deleted from their source.
When you drag Nodes or members around on a class diagram, the appearance of other element icons changes when the dragged element crosses their boundaries. This indicates that the icon being "crossed" has received focus and is a potential drop target. For Class, Interface and Package elements, the drop focus is represented by a blue rectangle around the icon border. Members are highlighted in blue when focused.
You can copy and paste Node elements within the same diagram, or between different diagrams. You can also copy and paste members within the same class or between different classes, and you can paste a class into another to create an inner class.
Copy
an element by selecting it and using the Copy command on the speedmenu.
Paste an element by selecting it's destination (element or diagram background) and using Paste on the destination's speedmenu.
Note that Cut works the same way except the source item is deleted once the Paste operation is complete.
An element that can be cut/copied and pasted can also be cloned by using the Clone command on its speedmenu. Cloning is basically a one-step copy-and-paste.
Note that you can perform cut, copy, paste, and clone operations from the Explorer using the appropriate speedmenu command of an element selected there.
Drag the lower corner of a selected Class icon to the desired size. Manually resized Node icons shift to an automatically optimized size when their contents change, when members are added or deleted, for example. Restore the default size with the Actual Size command on the element's speedmenu.
You can alter the routing of a relationship link's line by selecting the line and dragging any point on it in any direction. To remove bending points created this way, select Route Links from the speedmenu of either connected Node.
To change the source or destination node of a link:
Select the link
Drag either the source or destination end point of the link to a new Node element.
Tip: If the drop destination is out of range, drop the link end-point to the diagram background and select the target from the dialog that appears.
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