Select widget by pointer

#1

It’s challenging to select an unnamed widget for interactions; notably, there are too many widgets. It would be better if we could choose a widget by the pointer. It’s just like the way of select elements by the inspector of browsers.

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#2

You can submit feature requests via support@axure.com email. This is called out in the forum guidelines but might be easy to miss–and I’ll guess a vast majority of users here or on any forum don’t actually read these–but just be aware not to expect a response from Axure here. On the other hand, Axure has responded to every single email I’ve sent them (maybe 100+ over 6+ years), usually within a day.

I’m curious what exactly you are asking for though… Selecting a widget in the RP editor, or selecting a widget in the HTML prototype?

You can select a widget by pointer in the editor, and this is one of several ways to select widgets. As you hover over a widget (at least for me, with latest Axure RP9 version on Win10) a red outilne appears around the widget (similar to the pointer feature you show in the Google Chrome browser) …and clicking that widget selects it.

I’ve found it is best to name widgets as they are created, especially for complicated pages with lots of widgets, and use the search feature in the OUTLINE pane. Typing just a couple characters allows me to quickly find and select a specific widget among hundreds of widgets. Regardless of whether a widget is named or not, you can also hover over the list of widgets in the OUTLINE pane and see the red outline around the widget on the page. Clicking a widget in either this pane or on the page shows a selection “highlight” in both places. For me this is very similar to the Google Chrome browser’s Inspect behavior.

You can also select widgets on the page by pressing Tab or Shift+Tab on your keyboard. When the focus is on the page, this will select each widget (at the current level) successively, again showing which is selected with an outline.

#3

I think the request is to be able to select a widget (say, the target of an interaction) by clicking on it while in the context of defining the interaction, similar perhaps to the way Excel lets you select ranges of cells from any number of dialogs.

I’d love to see this, too!

J