[OpenLayers-Dev] arbitrary element as marker?

[Paul Spencer]

On 17-Jun-08, at 9:34 AM, Christopher Schmidt wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 09:21:35AM -0400, Paul Spencer wrote:
>> I could put two markers in the same location but that seems horribly
>> inefficient.
>
> How so? You're creating the same number of HTML elements, right?

yes.  Perhaps 'horribly' was overstated ;) but the problem I perceive  
is the drawing of each marker would go through the draw() process  
which calls modifyAlphaImageDiv a couple of times, once in draw and  
again in moveTo.  I haven't profiled this but I'm sure it adds a few  
milliseconds per marker to call this function and it seems wasteful to  
duplicate it when you really just need to position the containing  
element and let the developer position everything else statically  
inside the containing element.

Another reason for not wanting to do individual markers is that I  
would like to make the marker a bit more dynamic by adding some event  
handlers (mouse over etc).

In ka-Map, the equivalent to the Marker/Icon combo was a method called  
addObjectGeo which allowed you to place an HTML element at a  
geographic location and have the location managed by the  
'API' (including offsets from top/left etc) and I found this very  
convenient.

I'll create an enhancement ticket to solicit implementation suggestions.

Cheers

Paul

>
>
> Regards,
> -- 
> Christopher Schmidt
> MetaCarta


__________________________________________

    Paul Spencer
    Chief Technology Officer
    DM Solutions Group Inc
    http://www.dmsolutions.ca/