Most of our Map Suite developer controls ship with a number of useful extensions. These extensions enable your Map Suite applications to do things like support additional data formats, draw charts and graphs, or offer special control over map styling. Below, we'll go over each of the extensions currently offered with Map Suite and what they are useful for.

The FDO (Feature Data Objects) extension adds read support for a wide variety of vector and raster data formats that are not typically supported by Map Suite. With a running total of more than two dozen vector data formats and over 75 raster formats, chances are good that you'll be able to use Map Suite to work with the spatial data and imagery that you already have at your disposal.

For a complete list of formats supported by Map Suite and the FDO extension, check our Map Suite Data Format Guide.

Important Note: Because the FDO extension is based on a third-party open-source code library, you may experience unexpected issues beyond ThinkGeo's control when using an FDO-supported data format.

The FleeStyle extension, named after the Fast Lightweight Expression Evaluator engine that powers it, makes it possible to style your map by evaluating complex expressions from FeatureSource column data and also your own custom variables. With it, you can create powerful styles that do things such as color certain features differently based on an expression.

We've put together an example of the FleeStyle extension that looks to find countries with populations over 10 million that are also landlocked. Normally you would need to use a combination of nested styles or create a custom style to achieve this effect; however, with the FleeStyle extension you can leverage expressions to do these types of operations in a single style.

The PDF extension allows you to print your maps to a PDF using vector art instead of a rendered bitmap. To implement this extension, we created a new class called PdfGeoCanvas that inherits from the abstract class GeoCanvas. As a result, we can easily draw all of our layers using this new GeoCanvas type. This is not just a cool extension for writing to PDFs, but also a fine example of how extensible the Map Suite 3.x framework is. We went from normally drawing on a bitmap with pixels to drawing to a vector PDF with points.

For an example of how the PDF extension works, take a look at our Map Suite Wpf Desktop Edition Printing Samples. These WPF and Windows Forms samples utilize the PDF extension to power an extensive UI for creating and printing maps on customizable page layouts.

The Postgre extension enables Map Suite to consume data (including PostGIS enabled spatial data) from a PostgreSQL database. In addition to the API documentation for this extension, you may find useful the sample code posted by a Map Suite user in our discussion forums.

The ZedGraph Style extension enables you to draw charts and graphs on top of your maps. The simplest way of demonstrating how this works is through the ZedGraph code sample available here on our wiki. You will see how to add pie charts to a map, using gradient colors, labels for each pie slice and a title for each chart.

ZedGraph is a truly massive library for graphics and pie charts are just one of the may types of charts that it offers – including bar charts, trend charts and more. For further detail on all ZedGraph has to offer, see the ZedGraph samples site.