Extending Openlayers capabilites

If you have used openlayers in the past, you know it's capabilities very well. Openlayers allows users to put interactive map on client side. Users can see base maps, add data (vector and raster), capture movements such as click, hover, etc. , add controls like north, zoom in/out and add interactions like draw, modify, etc. Because of all these features, openlayers is a go-to choice (at least for me) when it comes to creating open-source web GIS application.

We at our agency Rotten Grapes pvt ltd. have created applications in various fields.

In this blog we'll take a look at some advance functions on openlayers using this amazing open source package maintained by viglino .

Styling

Openlayers by default supports Styling in following ways

1. Fill - allows users to decide the fill of polygon
2. Stroke - allows users to plan styling for line and polygon edges
3. Circle - allows users can create markers for point data using this
4. Icon - allows users to create point style using Icons and Images
5. Text - allows users to create labels

Apart from these , ol-ext allows following styles

Photo - using photos for icons , here is example of same

Chart - using various chart options like pie, 3dpie, donut or bar and data to define the characteristics of chart. Example

Texture - This can be used to fill texture in polygon. There are several texture patterns pre-built and custom textures can also be created. Example

Clustering - users can see dense data as cluster with animation using this. Example

Controls

LayerSwitcher - Creating controller for layer toggle along with opacity slider and Z-Indexing.

Swipe - Users can split screen to see separate layers at the same time.

Sub-bar - users can create nested menu items using this. Example

printdialog - Users can create custom prints using this. Example

Interactions

Draw Hole - Users can draw holes in existing polygons. Example

Split geometry - Splitting geometry by snapping to nearest point. Example

transform geometry - Geometry can be scaled up/down, rotated, stretched, transformed, etc. Example

OSM Geo-coder - add address search bar to application using OSM data. Example

Apart from these widely used features, there are many more. I'd encourage you to check examples page to find out all.

Let us know in comments If you want full course video on various capabilities of this package.