The first thing I did was check out the drawing tools. Fill paint selections override style bindings just as they did before and that makes sense to me as it is consistent with 8.1. The downside is that you can't apply style bindings to SVG elements from inside a drawing (which also kind of makes sense) so if you pick a color on a drawing element it will override style bindings. You have to find that fill property in the drawing architecture manually in order to remove the override.
It would be cool to have a drawing binding editor that lets you click on elements as you do in the drawing tools and adjust style bindings on them. This lets you animate colors on sub-elements based on styles without finding the elements in the drawing structure manually, adding a style element and then animating that with a binding. It would also be good in the binding editor to have an easy way to remove any fill elements which would override the style bindings but that might be tricky to implement.
A lot of times you can make a nice SVG drawing and animate a translucent overlay to retain any texture in the drawing while changing the hue. If you do these animations with CSS you gain the ability to make things flash, pulse, etc. For example, you could have indicator lights on your drawing that you want to stay in scale with the rest of the drawing but want to animate independently.
It would be helpful to have a binding editor that lets you navigate drawings similarly to how the drawing editor lets you navigate them so you can implement these bindings without digging through the elements.
Hi Steve! Thanks for trying out 8.3 beta, we appreciate the feedback! We'll certainly take all of this into consideration. Please continue to post about other great ideas on how to make 8.3 even better.
Another interesting behavior. I was just testing the exchange import tool and I imported a gauge tool I put on the exchange a while back. When I go in to edit the SVG it displays the numbers as unstyled in the drawing editor as expected.
I suspect a style editor is probably more difficult to implement than I first thought it would be. I just wanted to mention the caveat so send you down a rabbit trail. At the very least, here is some test fodder.
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I second being able to bind to style classes in the SVG. Building an SVG, skipping the bindings, then adding them to the SVG component on the view adds a few more moving pieces than doing it in the drawing tool, especially since you can set things like stroke color in the style class.
Text alignment in the drawing tool would be super helpful as well since you can bind to the text value. Thinking through building an icon with text in the center, binding that to a value and having it display center aligned instead of having to do the SVG and a text overlay on the view.
Lastly center aligning objects in the canvas would be nice on top of being able to align objects relative to one another like it has now.
