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

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Introduction

Every history has a beginning, in the same way every recipe starts with the initial condiments.

This chapter shows us the basics and more important things that we need to know when we start creating our first web mapping applications with OpenLayers.

As we will see in this chapter and the following chapters, OpenLayers is a big and complex framework but, at the same time it is also very powerful and flexible.

In contrast to other libraries, such as the nice but much more simple Leaflet project (http://leaflet.cloudmade.com) library, OpenLayers tries to implement all the required things a developer could need to create a web GIS application. That is, not only GIS related concepts such as map, layer, or standard formats but also manipulation of document elements or helper functions to make asynchronous requests.

Trivializing, we have described a big picture of the framework in the next paragraph.

The main concept in OpenLayers is the map. It represents the view where information is rendered. The map can contain any number of layers, which can be the raster or vector layer. On its way, each layer has a data source that serves data with its own format: a PNG image, a KML file, and so on. In addition, the map can contain controls, which help to interact with the map and its contents: pan, zoom, feature selection, and so on.

Let's get started with learning OpenLayers by examples.

OpenLayers Cookbook

OpenLayers Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Introduction