Based on a discussion forum request, today's web project shows you how to add sub menus to ContextMenu. This is a built-in function in all of the most recent daily builds of Map Suite, which you can download from the ThinkGeo Customer Portal. This project also demonstrates how to enable the ContextMenu's auto wrap feature when you click on the edges of the map.

In today’s Web project, we learn how to extend ScaleBarAdornmentLayer to create a custom scale bar that is based on a projection of choice instead of the projection of the map. This can be useful when the displayed projection of the map has highly distortable distances especially at high latitudes such as Spherical Mercator (used by Google Map, Virtual Earth, Yahoo maps etc). Using a scale bar based on distance geometry of the Geodetic (WGS84) projection will give a more accurate result. Note that the CustomScaleBar class is based on MapSuiteCore and can be used in any other versions of MapSuite such as Desktop.

This sample shows how you can suppress and draw exceptions in desktop overlays instead of throwing them. There is a little-known feature in the Map Suite Desktop Edition Overlay class that allows you to draw an exception in the event an exception is thrown during the drawing process. We have a default image we draw in this case; however, you can override this using the DrawExceptionCore method and draw whatever you want. By default we always throw expections, but to start drawing them you can use the Overlay.DrawExceptionMode property.

In this web-based project, we show you how to do a two-way interaction between the features in an InMemoryFeatureLayer and their information in GridView. If you click on a point on the map, you will see the corresponding item highlighted in the GridView. Or vice-versa; you can click on an item in the GridView and you will see its feature highlighted on the map.

In today’s project, we show how to have the WinformsMap control in a MDI form. Using an MDI form with a map background can represent a challenge. You will see in this project the technique to display properly a child form on top of the map. You can also notice how the map is accessed from the child form by plotting points on it from the child form.

Starting with version 6.0.113.0, Map Suite includes topology validation capabilities. This Topology Validator sample application makes it simple to visualize and test topology rules. You simply select the case you want to test, use our drawing tools to create the shapes necessary, and then hit the play button to run the test. The error cases are highlighted on the screen and saved to the test, and their Well-Known Text (WKT) is copied to your clipboard. At any time, you can view or edit the WKT which makes up the case. We save our test cases as XML files that contain not only the test case features but also the errors. This makes it a snap for you to share your cases with us or other colleagues.

For more details including a list of topology cases that you can test, see this article or watch the video overview

This project demonstrates how to create a web-based map using Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and Map Suite Web Edition. To meet the requirements of MVC, we inherit the interface IMapInitializer in the controller, which has a function InitializeMap that is overridden in the controller. We then implement the class “MapInitializerHelper” to initialize the map instance.