Another cool upcoming Maestro feature

The next version of Maestro (I have decided) will be version 5.1

I've already shown one cool feature that will be in this release. Here's another cool feature that just landed in trunk.

To illustrate this, here's the Map Definition in the current stable 5.0.1 release.

If you have a Map Definition of say 100+ layers, and you want to make the majority of them un-selectable, there's going to be a lot of clicking around different layers and un-ticking the selectable checkbox for that layer. Not very efficient from a usability standpoint.

You could currently take advantage of scripting to automate this task, but this usability deficiency is something worth fixing in the application itself.

So how did we solve this? Meet the revised Map Definition editor.

We now use a WinForms PropertyGrid component to represent the checkable/boolean layer properties. Why a PropertyGrid? Because the PropertyGrid has this special unique feature of being able to automagically edit not only properties of any object, but also be able to edit properties of an array of objects!

Meaning, we can now do things like batch edit the selectability of multiple selected layers

What about heterogeneous selections of groups and layers? No problem.

Due to the magic of the PropertyGrid, only the properties in common between the selected objects are presented in the grid for editing. Groups do not have a selectability setting, so this property has been omitted.

With this new feature in place, batch editing of common layer/group properties is now much simpler and faster.