Named Object Styles

[jfisher]

Hi,

I'm not yet running Leopard and can't try out the OG 5 beta, so allow me to ask a question about its new functionality:

Does OG5 support a way to have named object styles?

For example, I know that in OG4 one can have access to recently object styles and even select objects that have the same styles. However, what I would find compelling to make OG more than just a "pretty face" (i.e. a tool to display information beautifully) would be a way to collect a set of style criteria under a certain "name" (e.g. delegated task, untested process, sub-market) and then be able to apply those styles to a group of objects. Then when I'm selecting things, I'm not selecting "all red rectangles with a blue border" but rather "open tasks."
It would be analogous to using a "body" or "heading" style in Word, rather than Times, 20pt, underline...

In my opinion, it would bring OG a step past information presentaiton and closer to information management.


Thanks,
Jeff

[mjohasteener]

Ditto ... I quite agree ... this would be very handy for me, as well.

[jfisher]

Just to clarify, this isn't a feature request as such:

I'm just hoping that someone from Omni, or a user of OG5 can reply as to whether the functionality is there or not already.

Thanks

[JKT]

I don't think there is a dedicated interface for doing this in the OmniGraffle 5 beta, but there is a workaround (but it probably isn't quite what you are hoping for as it would probably be fairly laborious to implement):

In the Canvas: Selection inspector, there is a new search field which will find any e.g. text you have entered for a shape. How you could set this up to do what you want is to add your object name data as a Note for each shape (or as a Data Key and Data value - also new and in the Notes inspector). Then you can do a text search for that object data and it will select all shapes that share the same Note text (or Data key/value).

In other words, you can use the notes field to add tags to your objects and the selection inspector's search field to select all objects sharing the same tag. For your example, you could enter "Delegate tasks" as a data value for a subset of shapes and search for e.g. Delegate to find them all.

Unfortunately, the only area that this falls down is in copying the Note data to other objects - it isn't possible afaict and you would have to use duplicates of pre-existing shapes instead from e.g. a custom built stencil (either changing their colour and shape parameters manually afterwards or by using the style brush to copy presets to the duplicate shape).

[jfisher]

JKT,

Thanks for answering AND offering a work-around. As you guessed not quite what I hoped, but maybe enough in the interim.

Cheers.