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

Defining custom rules to style features


We will see a brief explanation before continuing with this recipe. The goal, as in the other recipes in the chapter, is to style the features of a vector layer depending on their attributes' values or their kind of feature.

So, an OpenLayers.Layer.Vector layer class can have an OpenLayers.StyleMap instance associated with it, which determines the default style of the layers if it has only one OpenLayers.Style, or the set of styles that can be applied for each render intent if it contains more than one OpenLayers.Style. In its own way, each OpenLayers.Style instance can be used in two forms:

  • Having a symbolizer hash acting as the default style to apply to the features

  • Having some OpenLayers.Rule instances associated with it

Here we arrive to the main concept of this recipe, the rules.

A rule is nothing more than a join between a filter (concretely an OpenLayers.Filter) and a symbolizer, if the filter matches the feature then the symbolizer is applied...