[OpenLayers-Users] SelectFeature control/Feature Handler interaction on programmatic feature selection

[Justin Stern]

> I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure my app suffers the same issue.
> You made me realize that. Thanks :)

ha ha, any time

> I tend to think that this problem must be dealt with at the
> application level. OpenLayers isn't responsible for us calling the
> select feature control's select method. One possible solution would be
> to use a click handler in our app code and do the unselect/close popup
> there if it couldn't be achieved through the select feature control. I
> haven't tested this myself but it should work.
>
> What do you think?

Yeah, you're most likely right, and of course rolling a click handler
is something I've considered, but with the SelectFeature control such
a convenient and easy solution for the most part, I was hoping to be
able to make it work.  Which my code does, I mean I'm happy enough
with how it works now, the main danger is probably that something
internal to the select control/handler changes in a future release
that breaks my solution.

Justin

On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 2:04 AM, Eric Lemoine <eric.c2c at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Justin.
>
> I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure my app suffers the same issue.
> You made me realize that. Thanks :)
>
> I tend to think that this problem must be dealt with at the
> application level. OpenLayers isn't responsible for us calling the
> select feature control's select method. One possible solution would be
> to use a click handler in our app code and do the unselect/close popup
> there if it couldn't be achieved through the select feature control. I
> haven't tested this myself but it should work.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Eric
>
> 2008/9/2, Justin Stern <jstern81 at gmail.com>:
>> The background: my goal is to make vector features which open a popup
>> when clicked, or when their name is clicked in a list.  The popup
>> should close when the features are 'unselected'.  To do this I add a
>> SelectFeature control, similar to one of the OpenLayers demo examples,
>> and when I want to open the popup programmatically , I invoke the
>> 'select' method on the SelectFeature control.
>>
>> The issue: this works well, except for when the very first action is
>> the user clicking the feature name to open the popup.  In this case,
>> clicking outside the popup (the map area) does not cause the popup to
>> close.  It must be closed via the 'x' or by clicking that or another
>> feature to open a new popup, at which point future programmatically
>> opened popups behave the same as those from clicking a feature.
>>
>> I tracked this down to the Handler not being informed of features
>> selected via the control 'select' method (which makes sense, the
>> Handler handles mouse events, which calling 'select' is not), which
>> causes certain checks to fail in the Handler when the user then clicks
>> outside the popup.  To the Handler nothing appears to be selected, so
>> it doesn't know to tell the feature control to 'unselect' the feature.
>>
>> Now I seem to be able to work around this issue by faking out the
>> Handler when I detect the first programmatic select:
>>
>> if(!selectFeatureControl.handlers.feature.lastFeature) {
>>     selectFeatureControl.handlers.feature.lastFeature =
>> selectFeatureControl.handlers.feature.feature = theFeature;
>>     selectFeatureControl.handlers.feature.handled = true;
>> }
>>
>> But it makes me wonder if my approach is wrong to have to go through
>> this sort of thing...  Any suggestions?
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>