/advanced-mapping-tool

Another advanced mapping tool by Dataninja

Primary LanguageJavaScriptApache License 2.0Apache-2.0

advanced-mapping-tool

A quite advanced mapping tool by Dataninja, enhancement of the original Confiscati Bene choropleth, based on Leafletjs, d3js, and many more libraries.

Installation

For normal use

git clone https://github.com/Dataninja/advanced-mapping-tool.git
# or download https://github.com/Dataninja/advanced-mapping-tool/archive/master.zip and unzip it
cd advanced-mapping-tool/
cp dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.conf.sample.js dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.conf.js
cp dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.custom.sample.css dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.custom.css
cp index.sample.html index.html

Edit the configuration file dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.conf.js accordingly to your needs.

View the map browsing to index.html.

You can download the final application to work offline zipping it: zip -r map.zip . -x@.zipignore, or you can upload it to an AWS S3 bucket, if you have a working aws-cli: bash -f -c 'aws s3 sync . s3://[BUCKET]/[PATH]/ --recursive --exclude $(xargs -a .awsignore | sed "s/ / --exclude /g")'.

For development

git clone https://github.com/Dataninja/advanced-mapping-tool.git
cd advanced-mapping-tool/
npm install
bower install
grunt
cp dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.conf.sample.js dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.conf.js
cp dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.custom.sample.css dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.custom.css
cp index.sample.html index.html
cp debug.sample.html debug.html

Debug file simply loads not minified versions of js and css files.

The configuration file

The dataninja-advanced-mapping-tool.conf.js is a simple js file that defines the mapConfig global object used for the customization of the map. In the sample version every parameters are commented, but here is a summary of possible configurations.

Debug mode

A simple boolean variable to activate / disactivate logging feature for browser development tools and a control on the map with useful information such as mouse position, map center, bounds coordinates and zoom level.

Language

A string parameter for language codes in ISO 639-1:2002 format (ie. it or en) for default numbers and datetimes formatting. It acts only on the output format, not on the input when reading a file, for example.

Google Analytics

The map already contains the Google Universal Analytics tracking code, to activate it simply set activate to true and ua to the tracking id of a valid property.

URL shortening service

The map generates a lot of URLs, ie. for social sharing buttons with proper GET parameters. You can use an external URL shortener, at the moment only the self-hosted Yourls service is supported.

Global map settings

The appearance of the map on loading. Here you can define many initial options passed to the leaflet map on creation.

The bounds.init object is used only if zoom.init is not set. If center is not set, the bounds.init geometric center will be used. The bounds.max object and zoom min and max values limit user's panning and zooming actions.

Be aware of correct attributions to sources! You can list them in the attribution array of strings, using also simple html for links.

Summary

If you want to publish a quite long text to explain map data, you can use a nice column on the left or on the right of the map. It can be always visible (or always closed, not so useful), toggled by the user clicking on a top-right icon, or shown (or hidden) when a boolean summary GET parameter is present in the URL (useful when the map is published also into an iframe element).

The content can be an html string, you can concatenate more strings with + to have a more readable code.

Tooltip

If you want to show a simple tooltip when user move the mouse pointer into a region of a geo layer, you can activate the tooltip. At the moment its content is fixed: "[REGION NAME] \n [key]: [value]", where [key] is the name of the variable joined to the region, [value] is its value, [REGION NAME] comes from the label column of the geo layer (not from joined data).

If true, this setting can be override for specific geographic layers.

Legend

Legend is the control where the mapping between data and colors is shown after a binning process (intervals of data values are mapped to single colors of a chromatic scale). You can set the title (shown on top), a global description (shown on bottom and overridable for each dataset), the delimiter between the bin bounds, and the label shown as title attribute of each colored square (it has to be a function returning a string with min bin value, max bin value and the variable label as passed parameters).

Menu

All geo layers, datasets, and columns are shown in clickable menus on the top of the map. To avoid too long menus, you can set here a max number of items (default value is 3). For each menu, if there are fewer items, it is shown always open. If there are more, the menu collapses and behaves like a select element (only selected item is shown and all items appear only on mouseover or click).

Geographic layers

An array of objects describing geographic layers available to the user. Two important attributes define the typology of layers: type (tile and thematic string values are supported) and source (tileserver, file and dkan string values are supported). Their specific attributes and options are inherited by the geo layer and can be overrided.

Specific informations about geo layer have to be stored in the schema object:

  • name: the unique name of the layer, it will be used also as HTML id token
  • menu: the string used as menu label (instead of the name)
  • id: the key in geo layer properties containing the unique id of features used for joining datasets
  • label: the key in geo layer properties containig the label of each feature

Geographic types

tile

The tile type defines an active tile layer with a default source equal to tileserver (see below) and an options object to pass to the L.tileLayer() constructor. Below there are the default values you can override here. The simplest default tile layer is defined by { type: 'tile' }.

Global inherited configurations:

{
    active: true,
    source: 'tileserver',
    options: {
        attribution: '',
        opacity: 0.7
    }
}

thematic

The thematic type defines an active vector layer of polygons suitable to be joined to one or more datasets. At the moment only choropleth maps are supported: you can color polygons from data after a binning process to couple data values to color bins. Two main options are required (but default values are provided, see Global inherited configurations > Geographic layers types below): classification sets the binning algorithm (implemented by geostatsjs library, available values are the names of functions listed in the Classification section of its README, without the 'get' prefix, or an explicit array of bins' bounds), style expects three options objects for default style, highlight style (shown on mouseover) and selected style (shown on click). The attributes of these last two override those of default style. You can also disable infowindow and/or tooltip for this layer and block the zoom level (in case of data not suitable to a too much detailed view, for example). Below there are the default values you can override here. This type doesn't define a source its own, so you have to provide it explicitly.

Global inherited configurations:

{
    active: true,
    classification: 'Jenks',
    infowindow: true,
    tooltip: true,
    zoom: 0,
    style: {
        default: {
		    weight: 0.5,
			opacity: 1,
	        color: 'white',
   		fillOpacity: 0.7,
    		fillColor: 'none'
        },
        highlight: {},
        selected: {
            weight: 2,
            color: '#666' 
        }
    }
}

Geographic sources

tileserver

The tileserver source defines the URL template to pass to the L.tileLayer() function, tipically in the form http://{s}.domain/{z}/{x}/{y}.png. Default service is OSM Mapnik basic map, but many more open services are available. You can customize the URL template simply defining a domain and a path. Final URL will be build concatening these two strings (but you can customize also the url() function, if needed). Below there are the default values you can override here.

Global inherited configurations:

{
    domain: 'http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org',
    path: '/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
    url: function() {
        return this.domain + this.path;
    }
}

file

The file source defines the local (or remote) path to shape files containing the vector layer definition. At the moment, only geojson and topojson formats are supported.

The URL are built by an url() function concatenating domain, path and filename string attributes. If filename is not defined, the concatenation of the geo layer name and the format attribute will be used instead. You have to specify also the format of the file in the format attribute.

[TODO] To the url() function three additional parameters are also passed: the region (the geo layer name), a filter key and a filter value. Without a fixed filename, the returned string is the concatenation of domain, path, a basename, a period and format. The basename are built from the origin, filter key and filter value strings, these last two set by appropriate GET parameters. [/TODO]

Files are loaded asyncronously via the d3.json() method, and in the callback function you can perform a transformation of result by the transform() function (the original file can be an array of geojsons, for example, so a valid json but not a valid geojson: within the transform() function you can prepare the results to further uses by the application, selecting only the useful geojson from the original array).

Global inherited configurations:

{
    domain: '',
    path: '',
    format: 'geojson',
    filename: '',
    url: function(region, filterKey, filterValue) {
        return this.domain + 
            this.path + 
            (this.filename || (region + (filterKey && filterValue ? '_'+filterKey+'-'+filterValue : '') + "." + this.format));
    },
    transform: function(res) {
        return res;
    }
}

Datasets

An array of objects descriping datasets available to the user. Two important attributes define the typology of layers: type (only choropleth is supported at the moment) and source (shape, file and dkan string values are supported). Their specific attributes and options are inherited by the dataset and can be overrided.

You can customize three functions that act to the loaded dataset in reading and writing phases.

  • transform: files are loaded asyncronously and in the callback function you can perform a transformation of result just after loading and before further calcula (ie. to remove commented lines)
  • parse: sources such as csv are read as strings, so a parsing step is needed for non string values such as numbers and you can define a custom function here that takes the column name (the key) and the raw value and returns the parsed value (you can also define a simple string for built-in javascript functions such as parseInt or parseFloat or use the default setting that parse integers in integers, floats in floats and strings in strings automatically)
  • formatter: printed numbers need a nice format, depending from localization (ie. period for decimals in UK and US, but comma for Italy and latin countries), but also from the value itself (ie. a float as a percentage or a currency), so you can define a custom function that takes the column name (the key) and the raw value and returns a string compatible with the format specification mini-language, passed to the d3.format() method.

Specific informations about dataset have to be stored in the schema object:

  • name: the unique name of the dataset, it will be used also as HTML id token
  • label: the string used as menu label (instead of the name)
  • layer: this string refers to the geo layer name this dataset is joined with
  • id: the name of dataset column containing the unique id of rows used for joining the geo layer
  • description: a simple and short text (also basic HTML) shown at the bottom of the legend when dataset is selected

Often a dataset (a table) contains a lot of columns but not all are suitable to be shown as a thematic map. You can define which column can be selected by the user and so can color the map in the menu array of objects. Each object represents a column of the table:

  • column: name of the column to expose
  • label: the string used as menu label (instead of the column)
  • description: a simple and short text (also basic HTML) shown at the bottom of the legend when column is selected
  • bins: max number of bins for binning process (an integer greater than 2)
  • precision: the order of magnitude of calculation results in powers of ten (0 means 'auto')

If the table has a lot of columns, often some of them are related and can be grouped (ie. age classes). You can define these groups and the columns belong to them with a groups object that has groups' names as keys and arrays of column names as values.

Dataset types

choropleth

For a choropleth map you have to provide the color palette, the binning algorithm and the number of the bins. The first one is defined by the Color Brewer sets, so you have to use simply the name of the chosen palette. The second one is set globally for the geo layer in the geo thematic type. The last one is an integer greater than 2.

With real data, binning bounds are horrible numbers with many digits not so nice to read on a legend. With precision you can prettify these bounds, setting the lower meaningful digit in power of tens. Original bins calculated by the given algorithm are so slightly changed: it's a matter of equilibrium between mathematical strictness and ease of reading.

These are global settings for the whole dataset: you can override the values of palette and bins in each column definition of the menu array.

Global inherited configurations:

{
    palette: 'Reds',
    precision: 0,
    bins: 3
}

points

[TODO]...[/TODO]

Dataset sources

shape

No external files, data are embedded in the geo layer features' properties. No inherited configurations.

file

See the Geographic sources > file section.

dkan

[TODO]...[/TODO]

Points sets

[TODO]...[/TODO]

Info window

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Controls