How does Flax serialize its controls?

Scripting
#1

I was using Flax at a hackathon a couple days ago to test out what it was capable of (had a few hiccups that I’ll probably post about in the future but overall excited for its future) and during development I was confused on how exactly Flax serializes Controls. For some reason, I can’t directly assign a reference to an Image Control in the editor.

To illustrate my issue I have a very simple script that shows the 3 different levels of encapsulation with Controls :

 /// <summary>
 /// TestImageControlStuff Script.
 /// </summary>
 public class TestImageControlStuff : Script
 {
     public Image imageToImport;
     public ContainerControl containerToImport;
     public UIControl uiControlToImport;
//...

I was of the understanding that all of these should be able to be assigned to in the editor. However, I see this instead:
FlaxSerializedFieldsIssue

I can assign a UIControl reference, but can’t do the same for the container or the UIControl.

Is this going to be changed? Is this a bug? Or is it intentionally designed so that I have to use UIControl to get these references?

#2

Right now, controls are C# only and are basically a property on the UIControl actor. The editor can’t serialize a reference to a property, so you can’t edit them in the inspector. Getting a UIControl reference is the intended way to work with ui right now.

For 1.8 Flax will focus on UI usability and improvements but i’m not aware of a change that would change this workflow.