Announcing: MapGuide Maestro 6.0 Alpha 2

Here's the 2nd alpha of Maestro 6.0. Here's what's new

Theming Improvements

You can now control the border color for basic point or polygon themes that are generated. You can either specify a static color or a dynamic darker/lighter variation of the generated theme color.

For stylization expression functions, we now provide specialized editors to easily build LOOKUP() and RANGE(), ARGB() and HTMLCOLOR() expression functions from the Tools menu in the Expression Editor.

MgCooker

MgCooker has undergone some major changes.

Firstly, the official method of tile generation is now the only supported method. This method requires a valid meters-per-unit value to ensure the correct number of tiles will be requested.

Secondly, the UI has been updated and superfluous options in the UI have been removed.

The native connection option has been replaced with a connection string interface which allows in theory for MgCooker's UI settings to apply to any connection provider that supports the required interfaces.

Advanced Stylization

We've improved the Layer Editor for scenarios involving Advanced Stylization (composite styles).

Instead of providing an option to add a new composite style, we now provide the option of adding a new composite style for the types you are going to be working with (point/line/area)

Each option will create a default monochromatic composite style for the given type. A much better default state to work from than a blank composite style that was created in previous versions.

The previously mega-verbose Composite Symbolization dialog is now less verbose.

The moment of clarity when dogfooding this feature was that generally speaking, you'll rarely care about editing the actual component Symbol Definitions because you'll be working more with the parameters exposed by the component Symbol Definitions. So the inline Symbol Definition editor is really a waste of screen space and has been removed from this dialog into its own dialog that is shown when you click Edit Symbol on a selected component Symbol Definition.

Also from that screenshot, you'll see other notable changes:

• Component symbol definitions in the list now show the name of the symbol in addition to its type
• The symbol properties grid now shows the data type of each symbol parameter so you know what to enter in for the value.
• You can find more information about a symbol parameter by clicking the Property Info button on a selected parameter row.
• The Edit Instance Properties button has been moved into the toolbar of the Symbolization Components list.

And like the parent layer editor, we provide several pre-canned symbolization components to easily create new composite symbolizations from scratch.

When editing symbol parameters, you can now edit via:

• Directly editing the cell content
• Via a specialized editor in the Edit Value dropdown
• Via the Expression editor in the Edit Value dropdown

Currently we provide the following specialized editors based on the type of the selected symbol parameter

For boolean parameters or parameters that evaluate to true or false

For numerical parameters

For color-based parameters

For parameters that accept a fixed set of known values

For everything else, we fall back to the Expression Editor

Download