This section describes major features that are new or changed since the previous release of MapViewer, which was included in Oracle Application Server Release 10.1.3.1. This section groups the new features into "MapViewer Core" and "Oracle Maps" subsections.
In addition, the MapViewer JSP tag library and PL/SQL API are deprecated features. For more information, see the notes at the beginning of Chapter 5, "MapViewer JSP Tag Library" and Chapter 6, "MapViewer PL/SQL API".
This section describes features related to MapViewer generally, including the Map Builder Tool.
Effective with Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 11.1.1.7, the MapViewer Editor is provided as an integrated component of MapViewer. The MapViewer Editor is a web-based spatial data editing tool. For more information, see Chapter 10, "Oracle MapViewer Editor".
Effective with Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 11.1.1.7, for custom geometry themes you can now associate the theme with spatial data from a GDAL-OGR or Teradata provider. (Previously, custom geometry themes could be based only on shapefile data.) For more information, see Section 2.3.9, "Custom Geometry Themes".
Support is added for the rendering of data delivered using the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) standard, specifically the WMTS 1.0.0 implementation standard. For more information, see Section 2.3, "Themes", especially Section 2.3.8, "WMTS Themes".
MapViewer now supports secure map rendering based on a web user's identity. Users with different roles or permissions will see different feature sets when viewing the same theme. For more information, see Section 1.8.
Web Feature Service (WFS) features can now be viewed through MapViewer's WFS themes. These themes support the parsing and caching of WFS capabilities, and the use of feature conditions and queries. WFS theme support also works with Oracle Maps; for example, you can display a WFS theme as an interactive feature of interest (FOI) layer. For information about WFS themes, see Section 2.3.7.
The Map Builder tool now supports the creation of WFS themes and Annotation Text-based themes. The base map panel also supports identifying features (and a list of rendered themes) on mouse clicks. For information about Map Builder, see Chapter 9.
MapViewer now supports a default provider and format for applications to supply XML-based nonspatial data for thematic mapping. You can also specify columns from the nonspatial data set to be used in conjunction with an advanced style. For information about thematic mapping using nonspatial external attribute data, see Section 2.3.11.1.
Previously, a feature could be rendered by only one rendering style. You can now use multiple rendering styles when rendering a theme's features. For example, you can shade a polygon with a color style while also plotting a pie chart on top of it, without defining two themes. This is done using stacked styles in a theme's definition. For an example of map request using stacked styles, see Section 3.1.13.
Previously, repetitive street labels or highway shields on linear features were displayed when such features consisted of many small segments. You can now use the Map Builder tool to specify the No Repetitive Labels option in the base map properties, to cause features (such as road segments) with same name to be labeled only once. For information about specific options in Map Builder, see the online help for that tool.
In the context of a base map, you can now assign scale limits to its themes' labels. These scale limits control when a theme's features will display their label texts. For more information and an example, see Section 2.4.1.
Full PDF map output support is provided. If you use PDF_URL or PDF_STREAM as the map format in your XML map request, MapViewer will generate vector PDF maps. For more information, see the explanation of the format attribute in Section 3.2.1.1.
The TEXT style has been improved to support customizable spacing between letters. It also supports additional (vertical) alignment options when labeling linear features.
MapViewer now supports heat maps, which are two-dimensional color maps of point data sets. Heat map styles are described in Section A.6.8.
MapViewer now supports scalable styles. A scalable style (such as a MARKER or LINE style) uses real-world units such as meter or mile to specify its size and other dimensional attributes; however, at runtime MapViewer automatically scales the style so that the features rendered by the style always show the correct size, regardless of the current map display scale. For information about using scalable styles, see Section 2.2.1.
The XML definition of a theme or base map now supports application-specific attribute tags. You can use the Custom Tags option in the theme definition in Map Builder to specify tags and their values, which can be interpreted by your application but are ignored by MapViewer itself.
The new <list_theme_styles> element enables you to get the names of styles referred to in a predefined theme. This element is described in Section 7.5.
You can now issue a simple URL request to the MapViewer server and get back a sample image of any style that you specified in the URL. This is useful if you want to build a custom map legend. For information about getting a sample image of any style, see Section 2.2.5.
Support is provided for OpenGIS Consortium standard annotation text. Oracle Spatial in Oracle Database Release 11g supports storage of annotation text objects in the database, and MapViewer now supports displaying such annotation texts on a map. For information about annotation text themes, see Section 2.3.10.
A new logging mechanism based on Java logging is provided. You can also use the Oracle Application Server management console to customize how MapViewer logs things at runtime.
MapViewer now supports rendering of geospatial data stored in non-Oracle Spatial repositories. This is achieved through a Custom Spatial Data Provider API, where you can implement an Interface that feeds your own (proprietary) spatial data to MapViewer for rendering. Note that you will still need an Oracle Database to manage the mapping metadata, such as styles and themes definitions. For more information, see Section 1.5.2.9.
You can now specify a nondefault row fetch size on a theme, by setting the Fetch Size base map property with the Map Builder tool. MapViewer can use this value when fetching theme features from the database. Specifying an appropriate value can make performance tuning easier in certain situations.
MapViewer uses the SQL array types MV_STRINGLIST, MV_NUMBERLIST, and MV_DATELIST, which support array-type binding variables that might exist in some predefined themes. In some situations, you will need to create these types. For more information, see Section 1.4.3.3.
The optional transparent_nodata attribute can be specified for GeoRaster themes (described in Section 2.3.4). If transparent_nodata is true, any GeoRaster NODATA value is to be rendered as transparent. The default value is false.
Effective with Oracle Spatial GeoRaster for Release 11.2.0.1, GeoRaster objects can be reprojected into a different SRID. For more information, see Section 2.3.4.3.
You can specify the user and password in a predefined WMS map theme for a WMS server that requires authentication for access to the WMS data. For more information, see Section E.3.3.
The max_connections attribute is obsolete: it no longer affects rendering and is ignored. The number_of_mappers attribute value affects the actual maximum number of database connections or sessions open for the data source at any given time. See the explanation of the number_of_mappers attribute in Section 1.5.2.14, "Defining Permanent Map Data Sources".
This section describes features for Oracle Maps, which is documented in Chapter 8.
Effective with Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 11.1.1.7, the Oracle Maps JavaScript API has a second API (Version 2, or V2) that is based on HTML5, as well as the original V1 API. The V2 API supports a richer set of features, and is introduced in Section 8.4.2, "JavaScript API V2".
Effective with Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 11.1.1.6, the Oracle Maps JavaScript API fully supports multi-touch gestures on popular iOS (iPhones and iPads) and late-version Android devices. Your Oracle Maps applications can take full advantage of this enhancement without any modification in your code.
Applications can now display Google Maps tiles or Microsoft Bing Maps tiles as a built-in map tile layer. Internally, the Oracle Maps client uses the official Google Maps or Bing Maps API to display the map that is directly served by the Google Maps server. For more information, see Section 8.6, "Using Google Maps and Bing Maps". (If you need to overlay your own spatial data on top of the Google Maps or Microsoft Bing Maps tile layer, see also Section 8.7, "Transforming Data to a Spherical Mercator Coordinate System".)
Effective with Oracle Fusion Middleware Release 11.1.1.6, Google Maps API Version 3 and Bing Maps Version 7 are the default APIs used for those technologies by Oracle Maps.
The class MVBaseMap in the Oracle Maps Javascript API is renamed to MVMapTileLayer to prevent possible confusion with the concept of MapViewer base map. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapTileLayer.
A new web-based user interfaced has been added to the MapViewer web administration console for editing map tile layer definitions, as well as previewing and managing map tiles.
The Oracle Maps JavaScript client can now display map tiles rendered directly by an external map tile server without caching the tiles with the MapViewer map tile server. For more information, see Section 8.8, "Dynamically Displaying an External Tile Layer" and the JavaScript API documentation for MVCustomMapTileLayer.
The Oracle Maps client can now communicate with cross-domain map cache tile and FOI servers without relying on a proxy server, which was previously required. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapView.enableXMLHTTP.
More support is provided for rendering FOI data using dynamic client side styles for business intelligence (BI) applications. New classes are added to the Javascript API to support client side defined styles such as color style (MVStyleColor), marker style (MVStyleMarker), bar chart style (MVBarChartStyle), pie chart style (MVPieChartStyle), bucket style (MVBucketStyle), as well as any MapViewer supported style defined in XML (MVXMLStyle).
Oracle Maps now supports client side dynamically constructed JDBC theme-based FOI layers. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVThemeBasedFOI.
Business Intelligence applications can now visualize application generated nonspatial attribute data on the map through the combined use of a nonspatial data provider and theme-based FOIs. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVNSDP.
The positioning, styling, and sizing of the information window have been improved. Previously, the Oracle Maps client always displayed the information window at a fixed position relative to the specified map location. The Oracle Maps client now can place the information window at the optimal variable position relative to the specified map location. As the result, the map does not to be panned in order to make the information window visible inside the map. In addition, you can specify tabs for the information window.
For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapView.displayInfoWindow and MVMapView.displayTabbedInfoWindow. The Tabbed info window demo on the Oracle Maps tutorial page shows how to display a tabbed information window.
The client now supports multiple collapsible map decoration components that can be positioned at arbitrary positions inside the map container. Map decoration can now be dragged inside the map container. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapDecoration.
The navigation panel and the scale bar can now be placed inside a map decoration component, which can be displayed or hidden and can be placed at a position of your choice inside the map container. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for addNavigationPanel.
Applications can now define mouseover informational tips or labels for map zoom levels. The informational tips are displayed when the user moves the mouse over the navigation panel. The user can then zoom to a selected zoom level by clicking on the corresponding info tip. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVNavigationPanel.setZoomLevelInfoTips and the Navigation Panel demo on the Oracle Maps tutorial page
Applications can now choose whether to label the polygon features of a polygon theme-based FOI layer. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVThemeBasedFOI.
You can now base a feature of interest (FOI) layer on an image-less polygon theme, causing FOI images not to be rendered if the theme is already rendered as part of the base map. This feature can result in much faster performance with polygon layers. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVThemeBasedFOI.
You can now associate a filtering geometry with any predefined theme-based FOI layer so that only the features that fall inside the filtering geometry are rendered on the map. This feature is part of the new support for proximity and within-distance mapping. It can be used with the selection tools (circle, rectangle, or polygon) to implement theme feature highlighting. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVThemeBasedFOI.
You can now construct the following type of geometries in geodetic coordinate systems with parameters based on Earth distance: a circle polygon geometry specified by its center and radius, a rectangle with its height and width specified, and a point geometry at the specified distance and bearing from the start point. These geometries, especially the first two, can be used for implementing proximity and within-distance type mapping. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVSdoGeometry.
The Oracle Maps client now displays an animated icon during the loading of a base map or a theme. This is especially useful for providing visual reassurance to users with maps and themes that take a long time to load.
The JavaScript API now provides methods for applications to modify the geometry representation and rendering style of an already rendered user-defined FOI, as well as the custom marker image for a user-defined point FOI. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVFOI.
The new prompt mode provides enhanced user control over marquee zoom operations. Prompt mode zooms the map when the use clicks on the marquee zoom rectangle, which eliminates the possible problem of accidental zooming associated with "continuous" mode. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapView.startMarqueeZoom.
Applications can now customize the appearance of the mouse cursor when the cursor is over different map components, such as map tiles, FOIs, and map decorations.
Applications can now use a built-in distance measurement tool to measure distance on the map. The built-in toolbar provides an easy graphic user interface for accessing utilities such as the redline tool, rectangle tool, circle tool, distance measurement tool, and any user-defined capabilities. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVToolBar and the Tool bar demo on the Oracle Maps tutorial page.
Displaying a theme-based FOI layer as a whole image may greatly improve the application performance, but it may be difficult for application developers to determine when to display a theme as a whole image theme. However, you can now choose to let MapViewer make the determination automatically. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVThemeBasedFOI.enableAutoWholeImage.
Long running tile admin requests that are interrupted due to Fusion Middleware or MapViewer shutdown will be able to resume automatically after MapViewer is restarted. (You do not need to do anything to enable this feature, other than creating the new database view USER_SDO_TILE_ADMIN_TASKS if it does not already exist. For more information, see Section 2.9.)
Applications can now display a map in the wrap-around manner. When the map is displayed in this manner, the map wraps around at the map coordinate system boundary horizontally and therefore can be scrolled endlessly. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapView.enableMapWrapAround.
Applications can enable the user to select and highlight individual theme features (FOIs) by clicking the mouse on the features. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVThemeBasedFOI.enbleHightlight and the Highlighting individual features of a theme based FOI layer demo on the Oracle Maps tutorial page.
The redline line tool can now be used to create polyline, polygon, and point geometries. The redline line tool also supports an editing mode, in which you can move an existing redline point or line segment, remove a redline point or line segment, or add a redline point or line segment programmatically. For information about redlining using the Oracle Maps JavaScript API, see Section 8.4.
Previously, all error messages thrown by the Oracle Maps client were displayed as browser alerts. Now applications can customize how the error messages are handled by using a custom error handler. For more information, see the JavaScript API documentation for MVMapView.setErrorHandler.
Many new Oracle Maps tutorials illustrate the new features. To access the MapViewer demos and tutorials, go to:
http://host:port/mapviewer/fsmc/tutorial/demos.html