Use OpenLayers for web mapping interface (replace Intermap with OL)

Date	2008/06/20
Contact(s)	etj, francois
Last edited	Timestamp
Status	draft
Assigned to release	to be determined
Resources	?

Overview

Replace IM with a more responsive map client. In the context of a project in Switzerland, Camptocamp team is working on setting MapFish as a client for catalogue. See proposal ​http://trac.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish/wiki/Proposals/Catalogue

• TODO : define mockup for GeoNetwork default user interface (Jeroen & all)

Proposal Type

• Type: GUI Change, Module Change
• App: !Intermap
• Module:

Links

• Documents: ​OpenLayers, ​MapFish, ​Ext.js
• Email discussions:
• Other wiki discussions:

Voting History

• No votation requested yet.

---

Motivations

The current implementation of the map client needs an image transfer from the Intermap server every time something in the map changes.
OpenLayers has a quite different architecture, where many efforts has been spent in order to minimize heavy data transfers from map servers to the client. Also many map operations are ready out of the box.

Removing the IM webapp in order to simplify the installation is also a nice target.

The main objectives are :

• add support for some Intermap missing functionnalities:
  • allow simple vector feature support (bbox highlight, define bbox or bounding polygon in the editor)
  • allow non WGS84 projection support
• improve :
  • map viewing (tiling, layer tree)
  • pdf printing

GUI will be mainly written using javascript. It will be easier to update the layout as it will use div and css (instead of existing deeply nested table layout). A jeeves service named "home" is using XSL to read localized string for the UI. Then all the layout will be HTML and JS.

Proposal

Function	Available in 2.2	Available	Comments
Zoom in/out	X	X	default OL navigation or in MapFish toolbar
Zoom slider		X	default OL navigation
Panning	X	X	default OL navigation or in MapFish toolbar
Zoom to full extent	X	X	double click the metadata record to go to the metadata extent
Layer tree	X	X	MapFish layer tree (add, remove, view, reorder, transparency)
Pdf printing	X	X	MapFish print module, TODO send by email
WMC	X	X	OL WMC support, TODO email context
Metadata Bbox higlighter		X

Function	Available	Comments
Markers & annotation		Not planned yet

Backwards Compatibility Issues

• JS file size for ext.js ​http://extjs.com/blog/2008/11/18/ext-cdn-custom-builds-compression-and-fast-performance/
• obfuscated JS lib for MapFish and OpenLayers : ​https://trac.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish/wiki/HowToBuild

Risks

Participants

• Francois
• Patrick