Canvas appearance

The Canvas appearance page lets a platform administrator set how every canvas looks for every organization: the layer and object-kind colors, the business modeling colors, the default visibility of the edge layers, and, per canvas type, the node decorations, connector styling, and layout. It is a platform-administration page, so it is available only to platform administrators, from the admin area (look for “Canvas appearance” in the admin navigation).

Changes are held as a draft and previewed live while you work. Nothing is applied until you choose Save, and Save applies the whole appearance to every organization at once.

Live preview

A sample canvas at the top of the page reflects your in-progress changes immediately, so you can see the effect of a change before you save it. Each canvas type tab also shows its own sample: two nodes with the connector actually spanning between them, drawn by the same rendering rules the real canvases use and at the real node dimensions that canvas type resolves to (a Preview zoom control steps the sample down to 75% or 50% when actual size outgrows the panel). Below the sample, a legend draws one short connector for each connector type that canvas draws, each rendered from your draft, so a per-connector change to the color, marker, size, width, line style, or path style is visible right where you make it. Previews read from your draft, not from the appearance that is currently live for organizations.

Layer and object-kind colors

Colors are universal: they apply to every canvas type. Each color is a compact dropdown; the chip shows the current color, and opening the control reveals the swatch gallery.

Layer colors sit on one row: Source, Landing, Staging, Persistent Staging, Data Warehouse, Data Vault, and Data Mart.
Object kind colors are grouped into three collapsible groups, collapsed by default: Raw Vault (Hub, Link, Satellite, Link Satellite, Reference, Hierarchical Link, Same As Link), Business Vault (Business Hub, Business Link, Business Satellite, Point In Time, Bridge), and Dimensional (Dimension, Fact).

Colors come from a fixed palette of named swatches; there is no free color entry, so every choice stays within the design system. Token-backed layers (Source, Staging, Persistent Staging, and Data Vault) retint the canvas only; swimlane and detail panels keep their built-in tint until a future update.

Business modeling colors

Three swatches color the business modeling canvas by what each entity means: Event entities, Concept entities, and Relationships. The two entity swatches tint each card by its category type (event or concept); an entity without a category keeps the neutral card. The Relationships swatch tints the relationship connectors and the grouped-relationship pills, and it is the same color the Business Modeling tab’s connector matrix edits: change it in either place and both move together.

Edge layers

Set the default visibility of the two edge layers:

Data flow lineage: the connectors that show how columns flow from source tables into derived tables. On by default.
Foreign-key relationships: the connectors that show which table a table’s columns reference. Off by default.

These are defaults. A person viewing a canvas can still turn a layer on or off for their own session.

Canvas type settings

Canvases come in eight types, and each type has its own settings tab: Lineage (the project and workspace canvas), Column Lineage (the column-level lineage view, styled independently of table-level lineage), Data Vault (the data vault model canvas), Dimensional (the dimensional model canvas), Entity Relationship (the entity relationship diagram, which both the catalog’s Canvas tab and the project and workspace canvas’s Relationships mode draw), Business Modeling (the business model diagram), View Designer (the Create View designer), and Template map (the dependency map in the template workbench). The tabs name the type rather than the surface, because two of them now theme more than one surface: restyling Entity Relationship restyles the project view along with the catalog.

Each tab shows the values that canvas type currently resolves to. Changing a control customizes that type only; the other types keep their own settings.

Node decorations: the kind badge, connector text labels, connector endpoint dots, and convention icons. A decoration a canvas cannot draw shows as disabled with the reason inline: convention icons come from the business modeling category lanes, so every tab except Business Modeling disables that one with “Conventions only classify business entities.”, and Template map also disables connector endpoint dots, because its cards anchor connectors to hidden handles.
Connectors: two levels of control.
- Default (all connectors): the connector marker (Arrow, Crow’s foot, or None), the marker size (Small, Medium, or Large, which sizes the marker head), the line width (Thin, Medium, or Thick, which sets the weight of the line itself), the line style (Automatic, Solid, Dashed, or Dotted; Automatic keeps each connector kind’s own pattern, such as dashed foreign-key references), and the connector style (Bezier, Smooth step, Chamfered (45°), or Straight). These are the values every connector on the canvas type falls back to. One exception: data flow lineage connectors keep a fine one-pixel line whatever the line width, so a selected column path always reads thicker than the mesh around it.
- Per connector type: a matrix below the Default row, with one row for each connector type the canvas actually draws, so you only see the connectors that apply (for example, the Lineage canvas lists data flow lineage and foreign-key reference, while Dimensional lists only relationship). Each row sets a color and can override the marker, marker size, line width, line style, and path style for that one connector type. Leave a cell on Inherit to keep the value from the Default row.
Layout: the algorithm (Grid, Layered, Orthogonal, Radial, or Organic), the direction, and the node spacing, rank spacing, node width, and node height.

Out of the box each type ships a distinct look: Lineage and Column Lineage are layered left to right with clean Smooth step connectors (Column Lineage with wider rank spacing for its taller nodes); Data Vault, Entity Relationship, and Business Modeling arrange their nodes with the Grid algorithm (aligned columns and rows on the canvas snap lattice), and Dimensional lays out radially around the fact, all four starting with kind badges and connector endpoint dots on; Entity Relationship, Business Modeling, and View Designer draw crow’s foot markers on their relationship connectors; and Entity Relationship and Business Modeling also start with connector text labels on.

Saving and discarding

Save and Discard stay disabled until you change something. Save writes the whole appearance and applies it to every organization at once, confirmed by a “Canvas appearance saved.” message; Discard returns the draft to the appearance that is currently live. Because the appearance is shared across all organizations, review your changes in the previews before you save.