OpenLayers Cookbook

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.

OpenLayers Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Web Mapping Basics

Introduction

Creating a simple full screen map

Different ways to include OpenLayers

Understanding base and non-base layers

Avoiding the need of a base layer

Playing with the map's options

Managing map's stack layers

Managing map's controls

Moving around the map view

Restricting the map extent

Adding Raster Layers

Introduction

Using Google Maps imagery

Using Bing imagery

Adding WMS layer

Wrapping the date line options

Changing the zoom effect

Changing the layer opacity

Using WMS with single tile mode

Buffering the layer data to improve the map navigation

Creating an image layer

Setting the tile size in WMS layers

Working with Vector Layers

Introduction

Adding a GML layer

Adding a KML layer

Creating features programmatically

Reading and creating features from a WKT

Adding markers to the map

Using point features as markers

Working with popups

Adding features from a WFS server

Using the cluster strategy

Filtering features in WFS requests

Reading features directly using Protocols

Working with Events

Introduction

Creating a side-by-side map comparator

Implementing a work in progress indicator for map layers

Listening for vector layer features' events

Listening for non-OpenLayers events

Adding Controls

Introduction

Adding and removing controls

Adding a navigation history control

Working with geolocation

Placing controls outside the map

Editing features on multiple vector layers

Modifying features

Measuring distances and areas

Getting feature information from data source

Getting information from the WMS server

Theming

Introduction

Understanding how themes work using the img folder

Understanding how themes work using the theme folder

Delimiting tiles in a raster layer

Creating a new OpenLayers theme

Starting actions outside the controls

Styling Features

Introduction

Styling features using symbolizers

Improving style using StyleMap and the replacement of feature's attributes

Playing with StyleMap and the render intents

Working with unique value rules

Defining custom rules to style features

Styling clustered features

Beyond the Basics

Introduction

Working with projections

Retrieving remote data with OpenLayers.Request

Creating a custom control

Creating a custom renderer

Selecting features intersecting with a line

Making an animation with image layers

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

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2 star

1 star

Starting actions outside the controls

Another different and drastic way to change the look of our applications is to place the controls outside the map and attach them to our own components.

Most of the OpenLayers controls have two features:

They realize some action (edit features, create a line, and so on)
They know how to render themselves on top of the map

To achieve the goal of this recipe, the idea is to separate the visualization from the action that the control does. This way, we can create some buttons and activate or deactivate a control depending on the button that is pressed:

As we can see in the screenshot, we are going to create a toolbar and place:

The same set of controls we can find in OpenLayers.Control.EditingToolbar, which will allow us to draw points, lines, and polygons
A dropdown button that will allow us to start the OpenLayers.Control.Measure action

Getting ready

We are going to use the Dojo Toolkit framework (http://dojotoolkit.org/) which we have used along with the source...

OpenLayers Cookbook

OpenLayers Cookbook

Overview of this book

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OpenLayers Cookbook

Starting actions outside the controls

Getting ready