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

Getting feature information from data source


We work on web mapping applications almost every day. We know how to create a map and add raster and vector layers. More than that, we know how to get vector data from different data sources: GeoJSON file, KML file, or from a WFS server.

At this point, and related to vector layers, one of the possible questions we could have is: how can we retrieve the feature's information? Fortunately, OpenLayers offers us some controls that can answer this question.

In this recipe, we are going to see in action the OpenLayers.Control.GetFeature control class that has the ability to query the feature's data source.

We are going to create a map with a base layer and two vector layers. One from a WFS server, with the USA, and the other from a GML file with Europe's countries.

On top of the map, a button allows us to activate/deactivate the GetFeature control and two radio buttons allow us to select between the USA or Europe layers to be queried.

How to do it...

  1. Let...