While straight editing of data through the web is great, the lowering of barriers to entry potentially opens things up for more bad edits. Looking to things like wikis and subversion, a number of projects are implementing 'versioning', to track the changes made to geospatial features. This work item is to make components to expose the versioning operations, like History, Diff and Rollback, as GeoExt components. The initial target will be GeoServer's WFS-V, but the tools should be designed to also work with things like OpenStreetMap's 0.6 API.
The basic tools needed for a versioning toolbar are components to provide history, differences and rollbacks. History should be available at a feature level (all edits to the selected feature), a view level (all edits on data currently shown), and also against arbitrary filters (show all edits by user 'cholmes' in the past 10 days that have 'go to mcdonalds' in the title). Diff operations should provide great visualizations of both textual and geographic differences, and should also easily expose the rollback between versions.
Other aspecs that need user interaction design and components are handling logging in, commit messages, up to date checks, and conflict resolution. Truly great versioning should also take into account Offline editing options.
Precedents for this work can be found in Vespucci and the New York Building Editor demo. The latter uses Ext.js, but needs updating and more components to get in to GeoExt.
Funding
This roadmap item is currently unfunded.
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
Map Styling Tools (SLD editing)
A premier feature of GeoExt will be a powerful style editor, built on the SLD standard, that can be integrated in to any application to let users change how the map looks. This will build on the work of Styler, improving and integrating those components to allow standalone SLD editing in addition to server-side style administration. It should support a variety of user friendly tools to create complex styling rules with ease.
Versioned Editing Toolbar and Components
There have been several applications making use of the WFS-V 'versioning' protocol of GeoServer, to do operations like History, Diff and Rollback in addition to the standard editing. These should have default components in GeoExt so people can easily add rich versioning capabilities to their applications
Web users especially require a flexible library of images for their map styles. We fill this need with an improved Image Manager for our Styler application.