Defining the order custom component properties appear in the Properties panel is a very tedious and unintuitive job because:
- In the Custom Component Configuration dialog, the properties are listed in the order they are defined
- In the Properties panel, they are listed in the order defined by their Priority property
- That Priority property works in reverse: if you have ten properties, Priority 1 means last and Priority 10 means first
- The Priority property is buried down in the dialog, and it requires clicking on the property, then on Show advanced settings, then on Designer
All of the above ensures that, when I add the 15th property to a custom component and I want to review the order of a few of them, I’m in for hundreds of clicks before I know what I need to do to put it in the right position.
Easy solution: make the Custom Component Dialog part of the tool panels and allow to expand all in one click.
Better solution: improve the Custom Component Configuration dialog (either the current implementation or the future one that sits under the Properties panel) so that:
- it doesn’t show the Priority property
- it manages the drag of properties up and down
- it sets the value of each property’s Priority according to where each property has been dragged
Even better would be to get rid also of the Group property and show each group of properties inside its group, but this would make the UI much more complex, and (in my experience) the order the properties are shown is much more important and much more tedious to manage than their groups.