Keyboard navigation refers to an alternative means of interacting with an application without using a mouse. In particular, it involves interaction with elements of the graphic user interface (GUI), such as menus, buttons, and so on. In the case of diagrams and charts, you can use keystrokes to move through the contents.

When you use this kind of navigation, visual feedback shows the currently selected GUI element, for example, a node or link in a diagram, or a point in a chart. You can also use keystrokes for the most important menu actions.

A JViews Diagrammer application consists essentially of Swing GUI components and graphic objects inside a manager view. JViews Diagrammer uses the mechanism of the graphics framework within JViews Framework for keyboard navigation. For more information, see Rogue Wave JViews Advanced Features Framework Keyboard navigation.

Most of the keyboard accelerators in the graphics framework can be used in a JViews Diagrammer application with the exception of:

In a dashboard diagram, in addition to the selection mechanism of the graphics framework (at the IlvGraphic object level), you can also use the provided selection manager (IlvDashboardKeySelectManager) to circulate the selection of the symbols. The symbols are arranged in a selection chain, according to their locations in the dashboard diagram. The selection manager keeps track of a selected symbol, and you can move the selection to the next or previous symbol in the selection chain. As a default implementation, the provided IlvDashboardInteractor class processes the keyboard input events and invokes the selection manager when you press the Arrow keys. When you press the Enter key, if the selected symbol has a target dashboard URL (see the IlvDashboardSymbol.setTargetDashboardURL method), the IlvDashboardInteractor shows a dashboard diagram displaying the dashboard contents specified by that URL.