sminnee/silverstripe-gis

Experimental GIS module for SilverStripe

GIS (Geospatial Information System) Module

Introduction

Adds GIS (Geographic Information Systems) capabilities to Silverstripe, in the form of new database types, formfields and mapping UI functionality.

The module was developed on MySQL5, which contains rudimentary support for OGC data types. It has not been tested with PostgreSQL, PostGIS or similiar (more advanced) database drivers.

Feature Overview:

• Tile rendering with GD image processing library
• Tile queuing via custom database-backed queue implementation
• Shapefile conversion into Dataobject properties (via thirdparty librayr)
• GIS-specific DBField subclasses: GeoPoint, GeoPolygon, GeoLineString
• GIS-specific FormField subclasses: GeoPointField, GeocoderField (Geocode an address-string to a set of coordinates using Google's free geocoding services)
• GIS-specific SearchFilter subclasses: BoundsFilter, LatLngBoundsFilter
• KMLDataFormatter for KLM output from the RestfulServer class on any DataObject
• CSVDataFormatter (not really GIS specific)

Maintainer

• Ingo Schommer (Nickname: ischommer, chillu) <ingo (at) silverstripe (dot) com>

Requirements

• SilverStripe 2.3.x, not tested with SilverStripe 2.4.x

Installation

Copy the modules directory into your SilverStripe webroot

Usage

The first practical usage of this module is the New Zealand National Broadbandmap. This SilverStripe project is opensource itself, we highly recommend to review its source code to get a better understanding what the GIS module does.

Known issues

• The thirdparty shapefile library is inefficient and doesn't support MULTIPOLYGON records
• Doesn't support tile serving (via .htaccess rewrite rules)
• The underlying MySQL support for OGC standard data formats and SQL syntax is sketchy at best

silverstripe-gis's Issues

An easy way of getting a bunch of DataObjects with a GeoPoint field onto a google map.

From http://open.silverstripe.org/ticket/3669

The gis module provides a number of geospatial data sets, but there's very little to help you get that data into a google map.

SilverStripe? should make it easy to take a set of DataObjects? (the result of an arbitrary query) and display them as markers on a google map.

This could take two forms:

A PHP module that injected all the HTML and JavaScript? necessary to show a map.
A JavaScript? library that made it easy to push the results of a RESTful query into a map.
The javascript solution would be more flexible, however, it might require too much plumbing. A hybrid approach might wind up be the best; chances are, it will become clearer during implementation.

One thing to bear in mind is that we might want to add clustering as a future extension, so leave room for this feature in the API design.