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

Filtering features in WFS requests


A key concept when working against a WFS server is the concept of filters.

Among many other specifications, the OGC has defined a standard that defines the notation to be used for filtering, the Filter Encoding Specification.

Filters are similar to the WHERE clause in SQL and allow us to select features that meet some conditions.

Note

You can find the Filter Encoding Specification on the OGC website available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/filter.

As we will see in Chapter 7, Styling Features, filters are not only used to query features but are also used to define rules to style them.

OpenLayers offers a set of classes suited to work with the filters the specification defines: property filters (PropertyIsEqualTo, PropertyIsLessThan, and so on), logical filters, and spatial filters (Int ersects, Within, and so on).

This recipe shows a basic usage of the filter classes to restrict the features queried on a WFS server.

Getting ready

We are going to query...