Order of nodes on the context views as opposed to their real order on the canvas

Question

Hi:

As much as I want the nodes on the context views to be shown in the same order as they are really placed on te canvas, I can't manage to get it right. There's simply no way unless I miss some hidden trick. Here's the scenario:

I have a set of children under a single parent placed and distributed in the following order:

|1| |2| |3| |4| |5| |6| |7|

When they are shown on the context views they appear exactly in the opposite order:

|7| |6| |5| |4| |3| |2| |1|

Why? I expect the nodes to be shown in the same order as they are on the canvas. In fact I have spent many hours long trying to meet my wish on this regard but the best I have done to overcome this behaviour is to delete all the edges liking them to the parent node and re-linking them in the opposite order, I mean, starting from 7 instead of from 1. There is no messages alerting about this limitation. Any way to solve this?

Answer 1

The context view automatically calculate a layout for the context view diagram. The algorithm that arranges the context diagram does not know anything about the original/main diagram. Thus the resulting layout in the context view is completely independent from the layout (including the order of elements) in the original/main diagram.

The fact that the order of some nodes in your context view is the exact inverse of the order of the corresponding nodes in the original/main diagram is pure coincidence.

And no, there is no way to control the order of elements in a context view.