Book Image

OpenLayers Cookbook

Book Image

OpenLayers Cookbook

Overview of this book

Data visualization and analysis has become an important task for many companies. Understanding the basic concepts of GIS and knowing how to visualize data on a map is a required ability for many professionals today. OpenLayers is a JavaScript library to load, display, and render maps from multiple sources on web pages."OpenLayers Cookbook" teaches how to work with OpenLayers, one of the most important and complete open source JavaScript libraries.Through an extensive set of recipes, this book shows how to work with the main concepts required to build a GIS web applicationñ maps, raster and vector layers, styling, theming, and so on."OpenLayers Cookbook" includes problem solving and how-to recipes for the most common and important tasks. A wide range of topics are covered.The range of recipes includes: creating basic maps, working with raster and vector layers, understanding events and working with main controls, reading features from different data sources, styling features, and understanding the underlying architecture."OpenLayers Cookbook" describes solutions and optimizations to problems commonly found.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
OpenLayers Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


This chapter explores from the basics, the most important and common controls that OpenLayers offers us as developers. Controls allow us to navigate through the map, play with layers, zoom in or out, perform actions such as editing features, measuring distances, and the like. In essence, controls allow us to interact.

The OpenLayers.Control class is the base class for all the controls and contains the common properties and methods that a control can have. We can summarize this as follows:

  • A control is attached to a map

  • A control can trigger events

  • A control can be activated or deactivated

  • A control can have a visual representation (such as a button) or have no visual representation (such as the drag action)

Controls are closely related to the handlers. While controls are designed to contain the logic of the action, they delegate to the handlers the low-level tasks, such as to know about the mouse or keyboard events. For example, the OpenLayers.Control.DragPan control is responsible...