Saturday, June 06, 2009

Easier Access to the Style Manager in GTViewer

With style-based symbologies now being more common than instance-based symbologies, the Style Manager’s usage in GTViewer has increased significantly in the last few years. As I have told users before, the Style Manager is a complicated beast, but even with its many quirks and nuances, life is much better with it than without it.

In GTViewer 8.0.x.18+, a new feature was added to streamline one of the most common sequences of operations with the Style Manager. After creating new data for GTViewer with FME or one of the GTData tools, the following workflow arises:
  • View the newly converted data with the default styles
  • Review a feature that you want to set the styles for
  • Get the feature’s Category Id and Filter Id
  • Open up the Style Manger
  • On the Style Manger dialog, navigate to the Category, then to the Filter Id
  • Adjust the Style
  • Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

This process is not so bad until you do it a few hundred times. However, you now have the option to set a flag in the [Additional Properties] section of the .GTM file to enable a new feature:
AttributeInfoEditStyle=1

With this flag set, you review a feature as normal. On Attribute Info Dialog’s Element tab, there is a new button at the bottom right called Edit Style:

Now, with one button click, the Style Manager is opened, the Category id and Filter Id are set from the Element Tab's info, and any assigned Style Mapping and Definition are selected.

By default, this option is turned off because it is probably not very useful (and somewhat distracting) to the ordinary user. However, if you are setting or tweaking a few or a lot of styles, this option is a great time saver.

3 comments:

Larry Cosgrove said...

Very cool. But "Lather, Rise, Repeat." or "Lather, Rinse, Repeat."?

Ha, ha.

Larry Cosgrove said...

Oh, wait. Maybe that is a Canadian expression. Ha, ha.

By the way, will this also work while using GTVx.ocx? And is there a method within GTVx which allows access to the Style Manager dialog?

GTViewer - Joey Rogers said...

The Style Manager is just in GTViewer.