Select All deletes Master Layer and All Its Elements

[Seneca]

This is a very tricky bug or an undesirable behaviour.

Suppose you have a number of items on a page. You decided to scrap your design and start again. So you delete all elements. You Select All and hit the delete key.
Bum, all gone, even the elements from the master layout you thought were safe.

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The only way out of this undesirable state of affairs, IMHO, would be to hide the Master Layer on spreads and add a button to the main ribbon to allow us to get to the four options added recently. (Detached, Linked, Content, Lock). This is too error prone to leave as is.

See my screencast:

 

[Seneca]

11 minutes ago, Seneca said:

The only way out of this undesirable state of affairs, IMHO, would be to hide the Master Layer

Or simply not allow to delete this layer. That would do it.

[fde101]

Before doing the select all, right-click on the master layer and choose Lock in the context menu.

[SteveP110]

Another option would be lock master layers but default and only unlock them when yo want to unlink etc. I do prefer the system that the publisher designers hve come up with however i have had a few accidents deleting text in a frame i had forgotten to lock on the master page

[Seneca]

11 hours ago, fde101 said:

Before doing the select all, right-click on the master layer and choose Lock in the context menu.

I know what needs to be done in order to prevent that, my point is that this is too finicky to leave as is. There should be a better way of dealing with that.

Not everybody will read manuals or follow our discussions. Someone not so versed in the software will think that select all and delete is the way to go. Particularly because the software allows you to do that.

[Seneca]

12 minutes ago, Seneca said:

There should be a better way of dealing with that.

I'm going to answer my own question. 

Well, we can actually do Apply Master... over the spread of the deleted Master Layer and that will bring the deleted layer back. 

This is not as bad as I originally thought then. 

[fde101]

My take on it is that you should not be able to delete layers that are locked, thus the default mode of being able to edit content but not move the layers from the master should not allow those layers to be deleted (same as the lock mode).

In the two modes that allow the layers to be moved, the existing behavior seems appropriate.

[MickRose]

+1

1 minute ago, fde101 said:

My take on it is that you should not be able to delete layers that are locked, thus the default mode of being able to edit content but not move the layers from the master should not allow those layers to be deleted (same as the lock mode).

+1