[ka-Map-users] Another interface thrown over the fence...

[Steve Lime]

Hi all: I took some time the last day or so to re-work our recreation compass (www.dnr.state.mn.us/maps/compass.html) application in ka-map and wanted to share the results. The compass was built for the general public and as such is missing things (like layer controls) that cause major confusion, so the app is perfect for ka-map. The prototype site is at:

  http://noah.dnr.state.mn.us/compass/index.ka-map.html 

It's fully functional- pan, query, zoom and place search pieces all work. Still need to disable zoom icons when at either end of the scale array, and pretty up the header, but...

Notes:

  - I couldn't maps without layers or groups working (user error most likely) so I ripped those things out of tile.php and have a stripped down version with asimplified cache structure.

  - There was one small hack necessary to kaTool.js to preserve and expose the coordinates of a mouse down event. (thanks Paul) Hopefully that will make it into CVS. With that change simple point-based queries are trivial.

  - I like mapserver reference maps better than ka-map DHTML reference maps, so I'm not using ka-map's keymaps. I imagine had I read through the code more perhaps I could achieve the same effect. Just shows you can build things in different ways.

  - similarly, I wanted 2 scale bars so I replaced the ka-map scalebar stuff.

Thanks to Paul for a great piece of software- use it wisely!

Steve