Adding & Editing Individuals

What you’ll learn

• How to add individuals to the graph from the population’s catalogue
• Every field you can edit on a node and what it stores
• How to mark an individual as deceased
• How to lock a node’s position so layout commands skip it
• How to delete a node

Adding individuals

There are three ways to add an individual to the active graph:

• Toolbar: Build → Add individual.
• Right-click the empty canvas: Add individual.
• A dedicated Add individual event from the canvas (e.g. when a layout has space for one) is also wired to the same picker.

All three open the animal picker dialog.

The animal picker

The picker lists every individual in the population, sorted by identifier. For each one, you see:

• The identifier.
• A sex symbol — ♂ for male, ♀ for female (no symbol for unknown).
• The year of birth, if recorded.
• A deceased badge if applicable.
• A subtle (on graph) badge if the individual is already on the active graph — that row’s checkbox is disabled to prevent duplicates.

A search box at the top filters by identifier, nickname, or alternate IDs (debounced as you type).

A summary line at the bottom shows how many rows are currently visible and how many are already on the graph (e.g. “23 shown, 4 already on graph”).

A Select All Visible button selects everything that can be selected in the current filter (i.e. excluding rows that are already on the graph).

Click Add to confirm. Selected individuals are placed on the canvas in a tidy grid, each with a unique internal ID, and you can immediately drag them into position.

Tip

You don’t have to add the whole catalogue at once. The graph is meant to grow over time — start with the individuals you know best and build outward.

Editing an individual: the inspector

Select a node and the right panel’s Inspector tab populates. The form shows:

Field	What it does
ID (read-only)	The internal canvas-local id assigned to this node when it was added. Useful as a stable handle if you copy node IDs from the context menu.
Identifier (required)	The catalog identifier shown on the node label (e.g. T049A2). This is the primary text users will see.
Sex	Female, Male, or Unknown (the default). Drives the small ♀/♂ symbol the picker shows and may drive styling.
Birth year	An integer between 1900 and the current year. Optional.
Alternate IDs	A chip grid — each chip is one alternate identifier. Press Enter, ,, or Space to commit a new chip; click a chip to edit it; click the × to remove. The find overlay searches these.
Note	Free-text scratch space, multi-line.

Press Apply to commit; Cancel discards your edits. Nothing is committed until Apply.

Internally, finwave keeps a node registry alongside each graph that stores the catalog fields above (identifier, sex, year of birth, alt IDs, note, deceased flag) keyed by node id, separately from the per-graph node instance that stores position, lock state, and any graph-specific classes. Saves persist the subset of the registry referenced by the graph being saved.

Marking deceased

Two equivalent paths:

• Right-click the node → Toggle deceased.
• (No inspector field — deceased is a class, toggled directly.)

Deceased nodes get a separate visual style — Deceased fill, Deceased border, and Deceased opacity sliders in the right panel’s Styles tab let you tune that style for the whole graph.

D is a keyboard shortcut for Focus deceased: it zooms to deceased nodes if any exist, or fits all nodes otherwise.

Note

Deceased nodes are not deleted. They’re still part of the catalogue and the graph — they just render differently and can be filtered out by certain operations. Auto-Associate & Split, for example, drops deceased individuals from the resulting matrilines unless they have living descendants.

Locking a position

Once you’ve arranged a node where you want it, you can pin it so layout commands (Organise A–Z, Organise circle, Auto-Associate & Split) leave it alone:

• Right-click the node → Lock position (the same menu item turns into Unlock position once locked).
• The lock icon overlays a locked node.
• You can still select and drag a locked node manually — locking only prevents automatic layout from moving it.

Deleting a node

Select the node and press Delete. Selected edges are deleted at the same time. The action is undoable with Ctrl/Cmd+Z.

Multi-selection: hold Shift and click additional nodes/edges, or shift-drag for a rectangle (standard cytoscape selection).

What happens to the underlying animal record

When you press Apply on a node form, in addition to updating the graph, finwave pushes the edited fields back to the underlying animal record in the population’s catalogue — but only if the node is linked to a database animal record (which is the case for any individual added via the picker; manually-created or imported nodes without a backing record are skipped).

The fields synced back to the animal record are:

• identifier
• sex (skipped if you set it to Unknown)
• dateOfBirth (constructed as January 1 of the chosen birth year, if any)
• notes
• alternateIds

This sync is fire-and-forget — a failure logs a warning to the browser console but does not interrupt your editing.

In other words: the Catalog Builder is not just a graph viewer. The Inspector form is one of the surfaces that edits the canonical Individual profile record for the catalogue.