Containers let you group and organize shapes in your drawing area.
Some SmartDraw templates come with built-in containers already. For example, a swimlane flowchart will have a swimlane container. A Kanban board will have a container organized into a series of lanes for your sticky notes.
You can also add a container of your own to any workspace.
SmartDraw has a library of containers you can find by searching for "container" in the Symbols area of your SmartPanel to the left of your workspace.
To add a container, simply drag it to your workspace from this library.
Each container has a different options you can set once they're added to your work area.
Let's go over each type.
Adding a Rectangular Container
A rectangular container will act like a frame and have all the options frames have in SmartDraw.
Once a rectangular container is added to your space, you can use the right-click menu to set its properties to make sure it behaves the way you expect it to.
Right-click on the container you just added to your page and look for Frame Options.
Resizing Your Container
Here, you can set whether or not you want your container to grow manually or automatically when you add shapes to it.
If you choose Resize Manually, you'll have to resize the container yourself to make room for symbols. If you choose automatically, the container will resize automatically as new shapes are added.
Add Sticky Notes and Other Shapes to Containers
A container can hold any shape or even other containers. To add a symbol, just drag it to the container. Once a shape is added to a container, moving the container will move any shapes inside the container as well.
Add a Title
You can choose to show a title or hide it. using the right-click options under Frame Options. If Show a Title is selected, the title will appear in a header at the top of the container. You can edit the text by clicking on the header and typing.
Adding Containers Inside Other Containers
If you select Behave as a Shape in Other Frames, you can add your container to other containers. Nesting containers and frames allows you to have more complex visuals.
Here, we've nested a swimlane container inside a simple rectangle container.
Duplicating an Entire Container or Deleting Containers
You can set containers and frames to behave like a group. Containers will always move their contents around when moved. However, checking Behave as a Group under Frame Options allows you to do the following:
- Allow you to duplicate both the container and its content as a group
- Delete the content of the container if a container is deleted
- Allow you to Send to Front or Send to Back both the container and its content using the Home tab
Adding a Bracket, Brace, or Oval Style Container
These containers are fully manual. You'll have to resize them manually as you add shapes to them. You won't be able to add a title or change other group behavior.
For the oval and elliptical containers, you will be able to change the fill and border color of your container using the right-click menu and selecting Fill and Border.
Adding a Swimlane Style Container
Swimlanes are most often used with flowcharts to organize steps in a process into categories to help distinguish which departments or employees are responsible for each set of actions. These categories are the lanes of your swimlane diagram.
However, you can add a swimlane container to any visual using the Container library in SmartDraw.
SmartDraw offers a variety of containers that all behave like swimlanes. You can have a single horizontal swimlane, a single vertical swimlane, multiple horizontal or vertical swimlanes, or a grid.
Simply drag one of the swimlane containers to your page and add symbols.
By default, swimlanes added this way have most of their properties set to manual. This means you have to resize the swimlane manually using your mouse to fit all the shapes you may want to add.
You can easily change these properties though and make your swimlane behave in a more automated way, similar to how it would behave if you started with a swimlane flowchart template.
You can set these options by right-clicking on your swimlane container and then selecting Swimlane Options.
For example, if you want your swimlane container to grow automatically when new shapes are added to it, uncheck the Set the Number of Lanes Manually option.
Adding a swimlane container, will also automatically add the dynamic Swimlanes control to your SmartPanel to the left of your workspace.
Learn more about additional Swimlane options in this help article: https://smartdraw.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042322252-Swimlane-Flowchart