Map Of London

Added a new feature whereby you can provide a set of coords in the URL, and the map will zoom to those coords and show all the features within the bounds. Also spent a lot of time transferring items from the old SVG map to the new system; I've completed all the Halls, which gives us one big set to work with, and we now have almost 100 locations, with no real problems of speed, so I think we're going to be OK as far as that's concerned.

Also split out LocList into a separate file, in preparation for better documentation.

Worked on the search page to try to reduce the horrible lag time, but had very little success. Building the search string and then using util:eval didn't produce much of an improvement. I think the problem is the combination of ft:query with some very nasty string-based filters; I really don't have a good solution yet. In dev I have one little helpful measure that speeds up searches for name+lane|street|road etc., but that's not helping much.

I have a working embedded map, with a reduced feature set, which shows up on both the category pages and the location pages. It seems to be working perfectly, although I'm still only half-way through figuring out how the labels should work (they should not display initially, but should display when you click on a location, in lieu of the usual popup box). I have them successfully hidden, but can't figure out how to show them on click; the feature overlay has a style which is not calculated based on the feature, so you can't retrieve the appropriate text. At least, I can't yet do that.

Today I fixed another wrinkle in the XML-to-OpenLayers/JSON mapping, whereby a single line-string (a straight line for a short road) was recorded as a zone/@points with only two points, but this is invalid. I've been forced to use @ulx and friends for this, as I have for the single point locations, and I've tweaked the XSLT and the map drawing code accordingly.

I also added the ability to select an existing feature and edit it, so that you can correct an error in an existing complex shape without having to redraw it completely. That seems to be working well.

Next I really want to move the LocList code out of the main module, and comment it more thoroughly.

An annoyingly long process figuring out how to encode the nested arrays to create the ol.geom.Geometry objects, but it's all now working, and the drawing interface is now generating TEI surface elements for pasting directly into XML files. There's one remaining hiccup: single-line streets generate two points, which is not enough for the TEI @points attribute, so I need to convert those (like the single-point ones) to using the four coordinate attributes instead.

Added an explicit rotation control to the bottom of the map; tweaked label display and font sizing; made some other minor cosmetic changes. The next stage is rewriting the JSON to use our OL coords instead of SVG.

I've added a toolbar at the top of the screen, and also implemented shape-drawing as a feature our staff can use to create new shapes to add to the location files. That should allow us to do away with SVG completely.

Hit a couple of roadblocks today: it doesn't seem to be possible to detect invisible features when mousing over the map, so my plan to show labels on mouseover will not work. I've implemented labels differently now, on the basis that you see them when you're zoomed in below 11. I've also got the navigation control well integrated with the selection and show behaviours, so that when an item is selected, it's also zoomed and highlighted in the navigator box; and I've implemented a DragBox, so that if you control + drag a box, you get zoomed into it, and everything in that box is shown. Coming along nicely. I moved the style code out into a separate module too. I need to do that with LocList.

I've decided to use the existing ref-by-ajax system for retrieving location information. That means I may be able to remove the abstract stuff from the JSON completely (although it's still there for the moment), making the JSON info very quick to retrieve. I've proposed that we stop diverting users straight to a location page, and stick with popups even when there's no abstract; I've implemented this on dev, because I really need that behaviour for the map. There's now a working rotation function (shift + drag) and I've made the rotation-reset button appear bottom left so it's not obscured by our controls. Coming along nicely.

Much progress today. I have visible item selection using a FeatureOverlay; I have selection discrimination (so that when you click on a point where multiple features intersect, it intelligently selects the best one to highlight/select); we have the map using the full available page area; I have a "loading..." message working, and there's now an explicit control for zooming a particular item to the centre. We're getting close.

The point display issue was a silly error (passing two parameters instead of a single array parameter). I now also have the categories scrolling instead of the whole nav box, and I also have a double-click on a location name showing the location, and zooming to it. GN and I are working with little success on creating an optimal height for the map canvas, though. There may be some JavaScript approach we can use, but I don't know what it would be. If we resize the div after the map is created, the map is stretched because the canvas resizes. We really need to size the div before the canvas is created, I guess.