[OpenLayers-Dev] #1666 - One Single, Mother Of All Vector Layers

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

I think this is really cool.

There are a number of us that feel like we're pretty close to a new 
major version of OpenLayers.  When we begin work on that, I am 
interested in accomplishing what you are doing here by having multiple 
layers share the same svg/vml root.

Don't want to take the wind out of your sails, but there are a number of 
other vector rendering issues that would be nice to be able to improve 
upon in OpenLayers 3.0 - and I think this sort of work belongs there. 
I'm interested in looking ahead to how we would like to do this without 
having to worry about backwards compatibility.

That said, it is going to take a lot of motivation (and $ for sprints 
with as many devs as we can muster up) to make 3.0 feasible.  So, I 
don't want to keep anyone from making cool changes to the 2.x series.

More in a separate mail.

Tim


Matthias Pohl wrote:
> @Eric
> 
>> It seems to me that your
>> patch is about grouping features of the same vector layer.
> 
> This is right, in this first step the focus is on grouping.
> 
>> To me "One single mother of all
>> vector layers" means having all geometries of all vector layers
>> rendered in the same SVG/VML/Canvas layer.
> 
> This is for the reason, that we don't want to break the API and
> structure of OpenLayers.
> 
> In our application we have a basemap and a couple of different and
> independent vector data sets in WKT format. When they were rendered in
> different layers it was not possible to select all data at the same
> time. Only the layer on the top was accessible.
> 
> Using the patch, all geometries of our vector data sets are rendered in
> the same SVG layer. They are independent, switchable, styleable and you
> can raise each one to the top. Since we don't have an other vector layer
> this one is our "One single mother of all vector _data_". Some controls
> are still external and have to be integrated into the OpenLayers API.
> 
> If this approach of grouping data in one vector layer is ok with the
> developers, it will be the next step to include and group vector data
> from all other vector sources.
> 
> matt
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-- 
Tim Schaub
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.