Rich vector editing with a variety of persistence mechanisms (WFS-T, Context, KML, JSON, MapFish) is one of the strengths of OpenLayers. This work item involves exposing the OpenLayers editing functionality and creating modular tools in GeoExt. Of particular interest is GUI's for attribute editing, so users can easily change the properties of the features in addition to the geometry.
The basic tools needed for an editing toolbar are components to insert, update and delete features. There also needs to be a way to determine if you want to add points, lines or polygons, and optionally which layer to add it to. The other main component needed for the basics is a mechanism for editing attributes, be it from within a pop-up or on a grid elsewhere in the application.
Behind the scenes we need to make sure that saves get persisted properly. Many people want to use different backend storage mechanisms, like WFS-T, AtomPub, or saving features directly out as GeoJSON, GML, or KML. There is also interest in offline editing using HTML 5 or Gears and then syncing back up when online. The GeoExt components should make it easy for the programmer (and eventually even the user) to select different storage mechanisms.
Past the editing toolbar basics, it should be easy to incorporate even richer editing capabilities, like the Snapping and Splitting components that Tim Schaub recently did for a client. Along those lines there are things like the Shared Polygon Boundary Edit Tool, the COGO Geometry Creator and the Build Polygon Tool which all give even richer editing capabilities to OpenLayers and GeoExt.
Funding
This roadmap item was funded by GEM, TIKE, and OpenGeo. Thank you!
These features were added to OpenGeo Suite Enterprise Edition 2.4.0
Get a quote now!
Get a quote or read more about core development to add your support to a road-map item.
Other Roadmap Items
Unique Values and Thematic Maps
Styling interfaces for thematic mapping require the classification of data, and the assignment of styles to each classification. This item would create a user interface for managing the style groups in a thematic map, and displaying the unique values in categorical data layers.
Editing Toolbar and Components
Funded: While there is rich editing available in OpenLayers there are now good default toolbars to make use of these in GeoExt that work well with the different OpenLayers persistence mechanisms.
Many applications will need to allow users to logon to a remote server, be it for remote administration, editing of data, or controlled view access. GeoExt should have a default manager for logging on, with different options for the backend login mechanism and desired front-end gui dialog.