Being able to draw optical frames in editor

Core Development Feature Requests
1

It would be great to be able to have some kind of a draw function to create rectangles in editor to group nodes optical together.

I have a picture attached of how it could look like. Similar to the selection frame.

proposal
proposal.png1116Ă—794 93.7 KB

It could also be kind of attached to a comment node to provide a UI reference point where it belongs to (for example to delete it).

What do you think about this idea?

1 Like
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Talk of stuff like this comes up from time to time. One suggestion was hierarchical movement tied to a "parent" node, one was the ability to lock a group in place, and another potential idea would be to treat a comment node as a sort of "tray" to keep a functional unit of nodes together.

In the mean time, have you looked into subflows? Not sure how great they'd be for the example here, due to all the dashboard nodes, but they're often very useful for organizing functional bits.

1 Like
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Personally I would love to see such a feature, I think that it would be very helpful in many cases.

As Jay say's, this has come up before and I'm sure it will again since this is an obvious UI enhancement.

However, it does add complexity to the admin UI and so certainly isn't likely to be the highest priority right now unless someone is prepared to work through it and produce some code.

4

It is something that comes up from time to time and I wouldn't be surprised if we did something along these lines in the fairly near future - once we've got 1.0 out of the way.

Whilst kicking around various ideas recently, there were a number of longer-term ideas we have that would be able to build on top of this sort of thing.

5 Likes
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Hi Team,
When I use node-red on larger projects, I typically try to break things into flows(tabs) however within about 6-8 UI instances becomes hard to manage, at least from a context-switching perspective. There is no hierarchy in the tabs and 'grouping' isn't possible outside of a naming schema.

If we had this UI metaphor, I'd liken it to OO: an Object equates to a flow and the 'frame' equating to a method (where there are lots of similar, typically related, artefacts.)
Having the 'frame' would also support the means to 'document' the code. Not only could you 'name a group' but there could be some discourse into the why/how around the grouping.

I'm putting my hand up for assisting the development if needed.

AB

6

This was added in Node-RED 1.1.0 : Groups : Node-RED

7

This thread is 2 years old. Since then the ability to add groups has been added and is a standard feature.