CrossModel User Interface

Understanding the main components of the CrossModel User Interface

When you open a CrossModel workspace you are greeted by the welcome page, described in full below:

Close it, or open a model from the Model Explorer, and you are looking at the workbench itself:

The workbench has four regions:

• The left bar - switches the left panel between the Explorer, Search and Source Control.
• The left panel - navigate your workspace. This is where the Model Explorer lives.
• The editor - the centre area, showing the selected model item: a form, a diagram, or the code view.
• The right bar and panel - the Properties view, CrossGenerate and the AI Chat.

The welcome page

The welcome page is more than a splash screen - it is the fastest way into a working workspace. It is the screenshot at the top of this page, and each of its sections offers something different:

Section	What it offers
Start / Recent	Open a workspace, or return to one you used recently
Tutorials & Examples	Clone a ready-made workspace straight from the CrossModel examples repository
Clone Repository	Clone any Git repository by URL - see Git Provider Authentication
Help	Links to this knowledge base and the CrossModel website
Settings	Open the settings editor or the keyboard shortcuts editor

Tutorials & Examples is worth knowing about before you start the tutorials. Pick a topic from the cascading dropdowns and press Clone, and CrossModel fetches a prepared workspace for you:

• BrightGreen is the base data model on its own, and is the starting point for the tutorials that build from scratch.
• tutorials gives you the starting point for a tutorial that continues from an earlier one - it contains the previous tutorial's result, without the answers to this one.
• examples gives you the finished result, useful as a reference or to see what is possible without doing the work first.

What happens after you press Clone

CrossModel asks you two questions before the models appear. Both matter:

1. Choose a folder to clone into. The picker opens one level above your workspace, so the folder it offers by default is next to your workspace rather than inside it. Select your workspace folder, then press Select as Repository Destination. Cloning anywhere else leaves the files outside the workspace, where the Model Explorer will not find them.
2. "Would you like to open the cloned repository, or add it to the current workspace?" Press Close. Because you cloned into your workspace folder, the repository is already part of the workspace and there is nothing to open or add. The other options move you to a different workspace root, which is not what the tutorials assume.

The models then appear in the Model Explorer under crossmodel-examples.

Each dropdown is one level deeper: the choices come from the branch names in the public crossmodel-examples repository, where every / in a branch name starts a new dropdown. Choosing tutorials → mapping → with-multiple-sources clones the branch tutorials/mapping/with-multiple-sources.

All of these branches build on BrightGreen, the shared base data model used throughout the tutorials, so every workspace you clone drops you into the same familiar landscape with only the material for that topic added. The tutorials index lists which workspace belongs to which tutorial.

You can reopen the welcome page at any time from Help → Welcome, and turn off the startup behaviour with the Show welcome page on startup checkbox at the bottom.

Reopening a session is not the same as restarting the workspace (as of v1.12.0)

Reload the browser tab of a session that is still running and the workbench comes back exactly as you left it: the same editors open, and the same one in front. Stop the workspace and Start it again and it does not. You get the welcome page and nothing else. The open editors belong to the running session rather than to the workspace, so a screenshot of a workbench with several tabs open is someone mid-session, not what a freshly started workspace looks like.

The left bar

View	Shortcut	What it does
Explorer	Ctrl+Shift+E	Navigate your workspace - contains the Model Explorer and the File Explorer
Search	Ctrl+Shift+F	Search for files by name or content across the whole workspace
Source Control	Ctrl+Shift+G	Work with models from a Git repository - stage, commit, branch and push

At the bottom of the left bar, the gear icon opens the Manage menu, which is the route to settings, keyboard shortcuts and themes.

The Explorer contains two trees

The Explorer is not a single tree. It holds several collapsible sections:

• Open Editors - everything you currently have open.
• Model Explorer - your workspace as model objects, labelled by name, with entities expanding into their attributes and identifiers. This is the view you will use most.
• File Explorer - the raw files and folders on disk, including non-model files such as README.md and .gitignore.
• Timeline - the history of the selected file.

Because the two trees answer different questions, it is worth reading The Model Explorer to see when to reach for each.

The right bar

View	Shortcut	What it does
Properties	Alt+Shift+P	Shows and edits details of whatever is selected - an entity in a diagram, an attribute mapping, a source object
CrossGenerate	-	The code generation panel: pick a model object, write a template, preview and generate
AI Chat	Ctrl+Alt+I	The AI modeling assistant

Other views

Not every view is pinned to a bar. Open any of them from the View menu:

View	Shortcut
Problems - warnings and errors when a model is in an invalid state	Ctrl+Shift+M
Extensions - install and manage extensions from Open VSX	Ctrl+Shift+X
Output	Ctrl+Shift+U
Outline	Ctrl+Shift+I
Model Explorer, AI Configuration, AI Agent History	-

VS Code compatibility and extensions

The CrossModel workbench is VS Code compatible. The keyboard shortcuts, the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), the editor behaviour and the settings model are the ones you already know, so if you work in VS Code you will find your way around immediately.

That compatibility is not only skin deep: CrossModel can run VS Code extensions, installed from the Open VSX registry. Open the Extensions view with Ctrl+Shift+X or from View → Extensions, search for what you need and press Install. The extension applies to the session you are working in.

This is worth knowing because the editors you use around your models are ordinary editors. A PDF viewer, for example, turns documentation that a colleague dropped in the workspace from raw text into a readable document - useful when you are handing that documentation to the AI modeling assistant. The same goes for syntax highlighting of the template languages you write for code generation.

Settings

Open settings from Welcome → Open Settings, from the gear in the left bar, or with the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P). Settings have two scopes, shown as tabs:

• User - applies to you, across every workspace.
• Workspace - applies to this workspace only, and is stored in a .crossmodel folder inside it. Because that folder lives in the workspace, workspace settings are versioned in Git alongside your models and are shared with your team.

Search for cross-model to find the CrossModel-specific settings:

Setting	Default	What it controls
Display: Labels	name	Whether model elements are labelled by their human-readable name or their technical id
Editor: Update Delay Ms	500	How long after you stop typing before validation, diagrams and completions refresh
Log: Server: Level	info	How much the CrossModel language server writes to the output channel
Trace: Server	off	Traces communication with the language server - for diagnosing problems

Choosing between names and ids

Every model object has two labels: a name you choose for people to read, and an id that is unique and stable for machines. Postal Code and PostalCode are the same attribute - the first is its name, the second its id.

By default CrossModel shows names everywhere: in the Model Explorer, in form fields, in grid cells, and on diagram nodes. Switch Display: Labels to id when you want to see the technical identifiers instead - useful when you are writing code generation templates or expressions, which refer to objects by id rather than by name.

The setting changes only what is displayed. It never changes the model itself, so it is safe to flip back and forth while you work.

The editor delay is worth tuning on large workspaces

Editor: Update Delay Ms trades responsiveness against effort. Lower it towards 0 for immediate feedback on a small model; raise it on a large workspace where constant revalidation feels heavy.