MapGuide Enterprise 2011

MapGuide Enterprise 2011 is now shipping.  I’ve been waiting for this release for some time now, as it is supposed to address some key components of the the MapGuide framework.  Of particular note for me is Fusion, or the Flexible WebLayout, which is supposed to be ‘much less buggy’, and more complete with additional out-of-the-box functionality including redlining, querying, and Theme tool. 

 

 

Fusion offers a much more pleasing UI experience for the user, however, with previous versions of the Fusion Layout, I just wasn’t comfortable implementing this into a client production environment.  With some ‘hacks’ and workarounds you could definitely get it functioning, but I just didn’t feel it was ready for prime time.  Time will tell if that’s changed.

 

As for the new tools, it’s exciting to functionality like this out-of-the-box:

Query Features

The new Query Features tool is essentially an ad-hoc query tool to query/filter any layer based on a property of that layer, and/or a spatial query.  The maximum results can be limited, and the queried features can be selected, and zoomed to through the UI.

A nice feature with this tool is that you can query a specific property, but then choose what prpoerty to output.  So maybe you want to look for all rooms that have a department code of ‘Pharmacy’, but you want to be able to see the resulting room number instead of a bunch of records returned with ‘Pharmacy’ as the return value.

 

 

 

Digitizing/Redlining

The Digitizing tool allows you to create points, lines, rectangles, and polygons.  The functionality actually takes advatage of one of the Open Source libraries MapGuide is built upon called OpenLayers.

OpenLayers is a JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies

The layer that the objects reside on can be renamed, and the digitized objects themselves can be renamed and removed.  The digitized objects can also be saved out to a file in a standard GML format.

Currently, the default style of the markup objects is controlled in the Widget JavaScript file

 

 Theme

The Theme Tool allows you to build a theme on any layer in the map, on the fly.  In my test I performed a simple 6 rule theme by area of rooms.  The themed layer was created extremely fast!  However, the layer did not show up in the Legend.  I’ll need to look into this further to determine the cause.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s for now, so unitl next time,
Take care

Warren M

Comments

[Mauricio Villablanca]

Query Features, Digitizing/Redlining, Theme

So the same scripts developers have been using for the past 3 years either with MGE or MGOS. Anything that's actually new?

[Matthew Nashmi]

Here are some others:

-You can add base maps from Google™, Yahoo®, and Bing™ Maps.

-Additional parameters are available when consuming WMS layers: transparency, image format, server-side coordinate system.

-New FDO providers have been added for SQLite and PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

-The FDO providers for ESRI® ArcSDE 9.3.1 and Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 SP1 have been updated.

-64-bit support on supported Microsoft Windows® operating systems

-Updated internet browser support: Windows Internet Explorer® 8, Firefox® 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 4

-OGC® Certified WMS 1.1.1 support

-Improved performance of MgMap creation

-Dynamic (progressive) Legend Generation

[reon]

Does anyone know whether the performance with the FDO Provider for SQL server spatial has improved in mapguide 2011? (use to be very slow in 2010).