Smart lines available in ERDs in Lucid

Hi Colin

Thanks for reaching out in the Lucidchart Community! When it comes to move objects/tables around the canvas smart lines behave differently in ERDS as compared to other diagrams. Since lines in ERDs refer to the relationship between specific fields in two tables when one of those tables is moved the line doesn't automatically adjust its connection points to form the most efficient path between the two objects because this could mean connecting to a different field. Thus keeping the line anchored to a specific field/point when moving tables prevents smart lines from changing the intended connection between correlated fields. 

To go over the details of how to create entity relationship diagrams with customized text styling and relationships between fields Id' recommend taking a look at the Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) article from the Lucidchart Help Center and for more information on how to format lines reviewing our Work with Lines article.

Hope this helps! Please let me know if you have any further questions.

This the single most aggravating thing about LucidChart, the main reason why I still use Visio for ERDs despite everything else I prefer about LucidChart.

The argument about aligning to a different field can be solved in two ways: firstly, just link to the left or right hand side of the box based on the horizontal positioning of the two relative objects being connected, and secondly, provide an option to just connect to the object without worrying about which field. It is rare to need to know exactly which field by reading the diagram - the FK  and PK information typically make this quite clear, especially when one uses good naming conventions.

I really wish you would reconsider what I think is the most important negative about the entire product.

Hi ​@Alan Perkins, thanks for continuing this post! Unfortunately, this isn’t currently supported in Lucid, but we’re very interested in your feedback and committed to continually improving our products. If you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear more details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience within this thread. I’ve also converted this post to an idea so that it’s visible to others within the Product Feedback section of the community - from here, they can upvote it and add details of their own.

Finally, for more information on how Lucid manages feedback via this community, take a look at this post:

Thank you for sharing your feedback and ideas in the community! Please let us know if you have any questions. 

Here is a simple example using option A.

 

 Now this is what happens when I drag project to the left of repo (or repo to the right of project):

 

As you can see, the lines remain with their starting anchor points, which is bad enough in this small diagram, but completely impossible to work with when there are many tables.

This is what should automatically happen after the tables are re-arranged:
 

In the case where I have chosen the (currently non-existent) option to anchor to the table, not the field, then the anchor points should be free to move to any point around the table rather than directly to the field.

For bonus marks, create an automatic placement algorithm for the line or the entire diagram that minimises crossovers, overlays (one line sitting on another) and bends.​​

Basically, if there are more than a dozen or so tables I am forced to switch to Visio simply because Visio knows how to handle this automatically. I do some diagrams with hundreds of tables and at that scale, this lack is a showstopper.

Hi ​@Alan Perkins, thank you for your feedback here and for providing details on what you would like to see in this experience. I can certainly understand how this would be beneficial. We encourage anyone else who’s interested in this to upvote this post and share any additional details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience. For more information about how we manage feedback in this community, please take a look at this post: