Canvas Controls, Coordinate Locking & Impact Analysis
Freezing layouts, contextual semantic lenses, blast radius tracing, and high-res vector exports.
The graph control toolbar provides an engineering-grade toolset for maintaining and inspecting large-scale distributed architectures.
Coordinate Locking and Persistence
When designing definitive architectural diagrams, coordinate locking prevents physics simulations from rearranging hand-placed components:
- Drag nodes to their intended positions on the canvas. An unsaved moves badge will appear.
- Toggle the "Auto-save positions" checkbox for immediate persistence, or click "Save positions".
- Coordinates are saved into the collection layout specification. Click "Reset positions" whenever you want to return to automated force-directed layout.
Contextual Semantic Layers (Lenses)
Layer toggles isolate specific architectural domains to reduce visual noise across complex topologies:
- Business Layer — business domains, customer-facing capabilities, and event triggers.
- Service Layer — microservice logic, gRPC/HTTP contracts, and synchronous dependencies.
- DevOps Layer — infrastructure hosts, orchestrators, reverse proxies, and cloud clusters.
- UI Layer — web frontends, mobile clients, and presentation components.
- QA Layer — integration test suites, end-to-end verifications, and compliance checks.
- Docs Layer — Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), specs, and compliance manuals.
Impact Analysis (Blast Radius Tracing)
Impact tracing evaluates failure cascades and blast radius before deploying breaking architectural changes:
- Click the "Trace Mode" button in the upper toolbar.
- Click any node whose resilience you want to audit (such as a database cluster or auth service).
- Corexar dynamically highlights the entire propagation path: Upstream dependencies (what this service requires) and Downstream consumers (all services that will fail if this node goes down).
High-Resolution Diagram Export
Export your architecture diagrams with a single click: SVG vector format (for embedding into documentation without blurriness), ultra-high-DPI PNG and JPEG raster formats, and PDF for architecture review boards.