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

Working with popups


A common charecteristic of web mapping applications is the ability to show information related to the features the map contains. By feature we mean any real phenomenon or aspect we can visually represent with points, lines, polygons, and so on.

Of course we can select a feature, retrieve its associated information and show it anywhere in our application layout, but the most common way to show it is by using popups.

How to do it...

  1. Create an HTML file with OpenLayers dependencies. Then add the div element to hold the map:

    <div id="ch3_popups" style="width: 100%; height: 100%;"></div>
  2. Within the JavaScript section, initialize the map and add a base layer:

        var map = new OpenLayers.Map("ch3_popups");    
        var layer = new OpenLayers.Layer.OSM("OpenStreetMap");
        map.addLayer(layer);
        map.addControl(new OpenLayers.Control.LayerSwitcher());
        map.setCenter(new OpenLayers.LonLat(0,0), 2);
  3. Create a vector layer and add some features to it:

        var pointLayer...