[OpenLayers-Users] Question on changing Popups on Textlayer

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 05:30:08PM -0500, Yves Moisan wrote:
> 
> > > So I understand that the title column can be named something else like
> > > name ? 
> > 
> > I'm not sure I understand your question. Is your question "Can the
> > OpenLayers code be changed to support this?" If so, the answer is, in my
> > opinion, "no": this format only exists for historical reasons, and any
> > new development should be done with more sane formats.
> 
> No.  All I'm saying is that what I thought was a tab separated textfile
> with hard names (see
> http://dev.openlayers.org/docs/files/OpenLayers/Layer/Text-js.html)
> seemed not to be hard names looking at the sundials code.  

Ah. The attributes attached to a feature are dependant on the data and
the format, yes. GeoJSON would let you have any attribute names you
wanted, as anther example.

> > > More important a
> > > departure IMO is that now one has to have values for iconSize and
> > > iconOffset.  With a layer.text, those were optional.
> > 
> > Fair enough. I'm willing to cnosider that a bug: Please feel free to
> > file a ticket folowing the instructions in
> > http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/FilingTickets 
> 
> http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/1844

Thanks. I'll take this, and try to get it into 2.8.

> And by the way for things like short lists of projects that one wants to
> throw on a website and where there's no data sharing involved really and
> where update rate is around 4 X 10^^-07 Hz (e.g. about once a
> month ;-) ), why do you discourage so much the use of Layer.Text types
> of layers ? 

Locking up data in proprietary data formats is always a bad idea.
Essentially, by putting data in this format, you are locking yourself
into OpenLayers, rather than creating data that can be reused if
OpenLayers gets sucked up and goes away tomorrow.

Additionally, by ignoring open standards like KML, you limit yourself to
the body of knowledge on this mailing list for managing the creation of
your data.

Lastly, the Layer.Text / FOrmat.Text code just isn't that good. It's
poorly documented, hard to use, and tends to be broken, so you're also
hindering yourself  -- if these things were better documented, you
wouldn't have spent 6 emails fighting with it, in my opinion. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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