[OpenLayers-Users] Strange. Labels treated as numbers

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 08:52:11AM +0200, Arnd Wippermann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to label features by the attribute name ( label:"${name}" ). The
> labels should be 06.01, 06.10, 06.080 etc.. But displayed as labels are
> this: 6.01, 6.1, 6.08.
> 
> Looking at the code I get no idea, where the place that cause this
> behaviour. Can someone help.
> 
> Here is an example of this behaviour:
> http://gis.ibbeck.de/ginfo/apps/OL27Client/OL28ClientGis.asp?WMC=./data/WMC/
> strange%20labels.wmc.xml
> 
> The black and red labels comes from equal attributes. Only the point is
> changed with a comma.

Looks like the text is being treated as a number at some point.
Specifically:

OpenLayers.Style.createLiteral = function(value, context, feature) {
    if (typeof value == "string" && value.indexOf("${") != -1) {
        value = OpenLayers.String.format(value, context, [feature]);
        value = (isNaN(value) || !value) ? value : parseFloat(value);
    }
    return value;
};

Seems like that's slightly overzealous; not sure why we're parseFloating
the value? (This comes down, to an extent, to OpenLayers not having
strongly typed data parsing, so we don't know that something should or
shouldn't be a number.)

I'd be in favor of dropping the parseFloat entirely, but I'm not the one
who put it there :) (Okay, literally speaking, I *did* put it there,
with my commit in r5429, but I don't think I wrote that code myself.)

Andreas, can you explain why this is here? And is it possible we could
somehow make it optional? 

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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