Lowering and raising groups is not persisted

Question

Hi, really liking yEd so far.

I found some issues though (yEd 3.8):

Create a rectangle

Create a group inside the rectangle (e.g. by dragging a group node from the palette onto the rectangle)

The group is now below the rectangle (i.e. invisible)

Lower the rectangle so the group is visible again

Save, close and reopen the model

The group is below the rectangle again (which is wrong)

Also: lowering and raising does not change the dirty state of the model

And last but not least: it would be nice to have a more convenient way to stack multiple nodes along the z-axis (not just the selected node completely to back/front)

Answer 1

yEd does not store z order at all.  It is optimized for diagrams that have either a nesting structure (i.e. if one node lies completely inside another node, the outer node should be a group node with the inner node assigned to it) or no overlapping nodes at all. (Basically the types of diagrams that can be created by yEd's layout algorithms.)

The fact that yEd does not store z order is also the reason for lower/raise not resulting in a modified document - there is no point in marking the document modified if the only modification that has happened is not considered for save/load.

See also Yed keeps forgetting Z order.