[mapguide-internals] Potential legend enhancements (was RFC 50 - Hide Legend Styles)

[Jason Birch]

Heh.

Along those lines, I've been thinking a bit about the current legend
usability.  I'll be putting these in as enhancement requests, but
thought I'd ask for feedback first:

- Add a new setting to allow the layer to be displayed in the legend
without the check box next to it.  This allows the theming to be shown,
but does not allow the layer to be turned on/off.

- Add the ability to define an external resource for a folder or layer
icon, and allow it to be hidden it entirely.

I have a couple motivations for this:

1. Some layers (like the layers comprising our official community plan)
can not be displayed or turned on/off in isolation for legal reasons.
As such, I have had to put them all into a single folder, and not
display any of the individual items in the folder.  This would be much
more useful from a user perspective if I could turn off the folder icon,
display the folder as a name with a check-box, and have each of the
layers shown underneath without the checkboxes so the user can see what
the theming means.

2. Some features pull data from different layers based on scale range.
In my case, orthophotos pull data from a single layer at one level, and
multiple layers at another. Currently, I am dealing with these by
placing them into a folder and hiding all of the layers, but it would be
nice to be able to change the icon for the folder (to a camera?) so that
it looks like a layer rather than a folder.

Any thoughts?

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Dechant
Subject: RE: [mapguide-internals] RFC 50 - Hide Legend Styles

The motivation is not from Studio as Studio cannot do anything about the
issue. You have to use the web tier test pages to grab the XML/edit it/
then save it back - I wish Studio could do this for you now, but it
cannot.

The motivation is so that the layer definition doesn't have to have
style information removed/added whenever you would like to alter the
appearance of the legend.