I'm working on a technical drawing which is made up of a large number of objects, with a rather limited number of basic styles (this is common in engineering - drawings have layers with a different line style for each layer). So, I created a layer for each style: one layer for dashed lines, one layer for shapes with white fill and no stroke, etc. As it turned out, it was difficult to just draw all of the shapes of one style and then move to another, as they had to interact. So, as I was moving across the drawing and adding shapes, I had to continually set the style to match the current layer I was drawing in. What I really wanted was something like Photoshop's "layer style", Or layers in CAD drawings, where whatever you draw on a layer receives the same style.
I was able to do this using the XML editor by copying and pasting the style attributes of existing shapes into the layer nodes, and unsetting the fill and stroke for new shapes. Whatever I drew after that received the layer style.
Now my question is this: Is there a mechanism in place to do this without editing the XML? If not, do you think there should be? I think it would be useful.