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

Creating a custom renderer


When working with vector layers, styling is a great feature which offers us a lot of possibilities: fill color and opacity, stroke color, labels and text colors, and so on. But, what if we need more?

Every OpenLayers.Layer.Vector instance contains a renderer that is responsible to render the layer's features (such as points, paths, and polygons) on the map using the best technologies available in the browser. These can be the HTML5 Canvas element (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_element) available in many modern browsers (such as Firefox or Chrome), SVG (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics), or VML (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Markup_Language).

When OpenLayers.Layer.Vector is initialized, OpenLayers looks for the best available rendering engine and creates an instance of OpenLayers.Renderer that will render the features on the map.

The goal of this recipe is to show how we can create a new renderer to improve the visualization of the...