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

Styling features using symbolizers


To see the most basic form of styling a feature, we are going to create a little map editor that allows adding new features by specifying some few style properties:

Each OpenLayers.Feature.Vector instance can have a style associated with it. This style is called symbolizer, which is nothing more than a JavaScript object with some fields that specify the fill color, stroke, and so on. For example:

{ 
    fillColor: "#ee9900", 
    fillOpacity: 0.4, 
    strokeColor: "#ee9900", 
    strokeOpacity: 1, 
    strokeWidth: 1 
}

In the code, every time a feature is going to be added to the map, the code will get the fill and stroke properties from the controls on the left-hand side and will create a new symbolizer hash to be used by the new feature.

Getting ready

The source code has two main sections, one for HTML, where all the controls are placed, and a second one for the JavaScript code.

The HTML section has plenty of codes related with the controls used to select...