Placing a material on a face in a component or group

[Al Hart]

We're working on a new tool to place a material on a face in a component (without having to open the component for edit first.)

The tool locates the face under the cursor, backs up until it finds where the current material is defined for the face (if it is in the default material), and fixes everything so that the face appear with the proper material - all in one step.

Is this a useful idea and/or has someone else already done it?

We are doing it directly from an explorer like material selection tool. (The Windows Explorer approach is nice because you can have multiple branches of the search tree open and move back and forth quickly - for instance if you want to place materials from more than one branch onto to various surfaces quickly.)

But the real value is quickly placing materials into components, and nested component, group, combinations.