Containers let you group and organize shapes in your drawing area. Once a shape is added to your container, it will move with the container and any other shapes contained in the shape. Containers can also have other containers inside them. You can connect any container to another containers with lines.
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 to help you organize your diagram.
SmartDraw has a library of container shapes you can use. Many templates will have this library docked to the left of your work area. You can also find it 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.
Adding Shapes to Your Container
To add shapes to your container, simple drag and drop them inside the container. Once added, the shapes will move with the container.
Changing the Order of Containers and Shapes
In order to add a shape to a container, it has to be above it in the z-order of objects on the page. If you have existing shapes that were already on the page when you added the container, you'll need to move them up or move the container down to allow you to add the existing objects to your new container.
We recommend simply moving the container to the back using Send to Back in the Home tab.
Deleting a Container
To delete a container, select it and hit delete or choose Delete from the right-click menu. Unlike frames, deleting the container doesn't delete its contents.
Resizing Your Container
Unlike frames, containers have to be resized manually to fit shapes. Adding new shapes won't automatically expand the area. To resize a container, grab the dark black grow handles and drag them to stretch or shrink the shape.
Connect a Container to Another Container with a Line
Unlike frames, containers can be connected to other containers with a line.
Select the Line tool at the top of the SmartPanel.
Your cursor will turn into a pencil.
Now touch that pencil to the edge of one container. You should see a dark black circle attaching the line. Next, draw your line by dragging your cursor to the edge of the other container until you see an anchor symbol appear. The anchor signifies that the line will be attached if you let go.
Adding Containers Inside Other Containers
You can add your container to other containers. Nesting containers allows you to have more complex visuals.
Here, we've nested a swimlane container inside a simple rectangle container.
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