Map Suite Desktop Edition Layers & FeatureSources Samples

For more information and a real-world example, please see the Map Suite discussion forum post at: Forum Post

We also added new designs of compass in smaller version. See the attached file: Rotating Compass New Smaller Designs.zip

At ThinkGeo, we are taking this concept to GIS and applying it to geographic maps. Heat maps are a great way to give the users a visually compelling representation of the distribution and intensity of geographic phenomenon.
Today, we are posting two Desktop projects on that subject. The first one is using the swine flu data we used in an earlier project. You can see how powerful the visualization of that data is to show the spatial distribution flu swine cases. In the next project, you will see how to take into account column values to produce various degrees of intensity using some earthquake data. In those two projects, you will need references to MapSuiteCore.dll and DesktopEdition.dll.

In this example, the magnitude of each earthquake (from 0 to 12) is taken into account to influence the displaying of the heat map. The result is California appearing even more intense than if only the spatial distribution were taken into account.
As for the previous project, you will need references to MapSuiteCore.dll, DesktopEdition.dll. As a caveat on heat map in GIS, it is worth mentioning that while this is great tool for displaying data in a very appealing and communicative way, it cannot be used as an analysis tool for studying spatial behaviors. For spatial analysis, GRID is the appropriate tool. Although a heat map looks like a GRID, it is not one and it cannot substitute GRID for spatial analysis.

To bring this all together, check out our instructional video that will walk you through the process of setting up and working with isolines in Map Suite.

Please note that you will need version 5.0.87.0 or newer of Map Suite in order to use isolines. For more information on how to upgrade, see the Map Suite Daily Builds Guide.

In this project, we create a Graticule Adorment Layer that shows Meridians and Parallels displaying through the map. Meridians are lines of longitude and they have a North South orientation. Parallels are lines of latitude and they have an East West orientation. Showing graticule for latitude and longitude is a standard way in cartography to give spatial references to the users.
You will find two zip files. One is for the Desktop Edition “LatLongGraticule” and it shows nicely the effect of the meridians and parallels as you pan and zoom in and out. You will also see, as additional spatial references to the users, the latitude and longitude location at the mouse pointer in labels at the mouse move event. You will see that information in the decimal degrees format and in the Degrees Minutes Seconds format.
For those that don’t have the Desktop Edition, you will find the zip file “LatLongGraticuleServices” for the Service edition. It is using exactly the same GraticuleAdormentLayer class.
In the future, we will offer another class for graticule with more options for formatting and displaying the graticule. It will also offer projection support for map that are not in Decimal Degrees map unit.

In working with customers using MapShapes for a number of years, we found a common pattern. First, users tried MapShapes by adding one to the screen. This was very simple and got them up and running fast. They next added a few more as they started to build more of their application. After a short amount of time they realized that it was cumbersome to set the projection, styles, zoom levels, etc. on so many MapShapes, especially since the MapShapes often represented the same kind of underlying feature, like a fire hydrant or road block. The problem was that there was no good solution with Map Suite 2.0 to handle lots of very similar dynamic features.
In designing Map Suite 3.0, we took this into account and created the InMemoryFeatureLayer and InMemoryFeatureSource. These allowed you to treat all of the same kinds of similar features as if they were one group, which solved many problems. What we later found was that it made it more difficult for the cases where you truly had dozens or hundreds of features that were each unique and you needed to represent them as such. Having not implemented MapShapes, we were caught with a hole in our offering.
To fill this gap, we are presenting a project for a simple MapShapeLayer. This is a simple version of a more powerful one that we will include as part of the core framework in the near future. What really struck us when we were creating this new Layer was just how easy it was to do! It is a testament to our 3.0 framework and we decided to include the section below on how we implemented it. Notes from the developer:
Success! This was about as easy as I thought it would be. All of the heavy lifting was done by existing classes and all I needed was a little glue code. In retrospect, I would had liked to do this by inheriting from the FeatureLayer and FeatureSource, because then it would have made the layer accessible by spatial queries. In the interests of time, and so I could post this on our forums as fast as possible, I inherited from Layer, which is really simple. You can see that the comments and my notes here take up more room than the code itself!
I think you will find this works nearly exactly as the 2.0 MapShapes did. It doesn't support projection; however, I think this could be easily added. We will be creating a production version of this class to include with the framework in the near future, and if projection is indeed easy to add, it will support projection and spatial querying.
In a nutshell, what I did was to create a MapShape class that housed a ZoomLevelSet and a single Feature. The ZoomLevelSet has all of the zoom levels, styles, etc. on it, so that part was nice to reuse. I matched this up with a new kind of Layer. I created the MapShapeLayer by inheriting from Layer. The only required overload was Draw, which was nice. I added to the class a MapShape's GeoCollection to store all of your MapShapes. In the Draw I simply looped through the MapShapes, and for each of them I found the zoom level that would be drawing and called its Draw method. In just a few lines of code, it all came together.

This class show how to do that using JPEG images with its associating JGW world file. It speeds up the loading of a large number of Raster layers by loading and drawing on demand only the files in the current extent. It loads a reference file that contains the bounding box, path and file information for all of the Raster files. We load this information into an in-memory spatial index. When the map requests to draw the layer, we find the Rasters that are in the current extent, create a layer on-the-fly, call their Draw method and then close them. In this way, we load on demand only the files that are in the current extent.

http://gis.thinkgeo.com/Support/DiscussionForums/tabid/143/aff/21/aft/5921/afv/topic/Default.aspx
http://gis.thinkgeo.com/Support/DiscussionForums/tabid/143/aff/21/aft/5958/afv/topic/Default.aspx
Consolidating various physical shapefiles into one layer is a flexible and clean way to handle your data. Thanks to multi index, you can treat your layers as one. Depending on your needs you can choose to use all the shapefiles in one folder or only a few. In this project you will see the different ways to use the powerful static function MultipleShapeFileFeatureLayer.BuildIndex()

This Code Community project demonstrates how to load and display a TAB file using the new TabFeatureLayer. The example also allows you to add, edit and delete features from the TAB file.

Rotating the map:

To rotate the map, you have to be aware that you have to use RotationProjection class provided by MapSuite API. All the layers need to have their projection property set to RotationProjection. Beware that if a Layer does not have that property set, it will not rotate along with the rest of the map.

Displaying the North Arrow:

As the map rotate, it is important to keep track of the orientation of the map and to know what the direction to the North is. Inheriting from Adornment Layer, RotatingAdornmentLayer class takes an Image representing a North Arrow and with its RotateAngle property set according to the angle property of RotationProjection, it always shows the North correctly.

In this project, we create the class OledbPointFeatureSource inheriting from FeatureSource and OledbPointFeatureLayer inheriting from FeatureSource.

Disclaimer: This encryption system can be used only on small shapefiles due to the amount of memory used. A typical use would be to encrypt some valuable small shapefiles you don't want your users to access. In the future, Map Suite will provide a full encryption system as an API.

On the web site http://www.mapcruzin.com/free-download-h1n1-swine-flu-arcgis-shapefile.htm, it is possible to download point based shapefiles of swine flu occurrences in the world. While this information is valuable, it is a little difficult to display it at world level. At high zoom levels, all the points are on top of each other making the map very difficult to read and get overall information of the swine flu situation at the world level as you can see in the image with the map of the upper left.
Using some the techniques we used before such as Spatial Join with some modification, we can create a new polygon based layer from the country layer adding info from the swine flu layer. That resulting layer can be displayed with the info being a lot more readable as you can see in the map of the lower right corner of the image.
We basically use the techniques we saw in the “Spatial Join” project with getting the info from the swine flu layer into the country layer based on spatial relationship. We also use the techniques from “Dissolve with statistics” for doing some statistics on the swine flu records according to what country they belong to. See the comments in the project for more details.
Keep in mind that the project is for shapefile data format, if there are people expressing interest for doing the same thing with other data format, we will create a new more generic project.

http://zedgraph.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
With Map Suite, you have the whole ZedGraph API available with an easy interface to add the graphs to the map.
For this project, in addition to the MapSuiteCore.dll, you will also need the ZedGraph.dll and ZedGraphStyleExtension.dll references. We will have several projects showing how to integrate other types of charts to your map.