Has anyone seen a way to shade/color areas of a google map that are outside of a boundary/shape created by a KML file?
An example usage would be that only the area inside the boundary/shape would be interactive (click listeners etc.), and the shaded area outside of the boundary would ignore all actions aside from the basic map functionality, like moving the map back and forth.
Here is an option I have been working on (doesn't quite completely work, but the concept may address your question):
Create a KML file of the area of interest (in the example US states)
Invert it by adding an outer boundary of the whole world
Either display it on your map using an additional KmlLayer or import it into FusionTable (like the example)
Be sure to suppress infoWindows on the "inverted" layer
Example
- Doesn't work for Virginia or Alaska
- Hawaii is problematic.
- Limits the minimum zoom to 5.
Related
Is there a way to insert the image overlay a layer below the streets but on top of the map background? The roads can be individually styled, so it should technically work, but I haven't been able to find the option for it.
The only lead I have found so far is this question: Google Maps API - Overlay Custom Roads
Which unfortunately doesn't really solve the problem of having to manually enter the street info.
I'm currently working on a custom map for a whole city and manually illustrate all the streets and enter the street names would take an enormous amount of time.
Any info would be very appreciated, thanks!
Try to check this documentation about Styled Maps. Styled maps allow you to customize the presentation of the standard Google base maps, changing the visual display of such elements as roads, parks, and built-up areas.
Here you can also find some sample code that you can use in your sample code.
Also you can find here the Styled Map Wizard.
Creating styles by hand and testing your code to see how they look is potentially time-consuming. Instead, you can use the Styled Map Wizard to set up the JSON for your map's styles. The wizard allows you to select features and their elements, apply operations to those features, and save the styles to JSON, which you can copy and paste into your application.
I am doing some research for what Map API to use for a coming project.
The main requirement is the ability to lock a map, and the ability to disable parts of the map.
Think about a special purpose map for Europe where I would like to disable and gray out the non-european countries.
A click on those grayed out areas should do nothing, meaning for all of the world except for Europe.
So, is it possible to disable large portions of the map?
Is it possible to add layers for the borders for each country, that is clickable, for instance on Germany?
I am looking at Bing or Google Maps at this point. Which one is more developer friendly one?
Bing looks so much nicer with the birds eye, much easier to read out the map and know what you are looking at. I find Googles full of clutter and always have problem knowing what I am looking at.
Possible approach(google-Maps): use a Polygon with multiple paths.
1 path for the entire world(vertices defined in clockwise order)
other paths for the enabled area(vertices defined in opposite clockwise order)
The result will be a polygon that covers the entire world with a hole for the enabled area. The map will not respond to click-events outside the enabled area(because it's covered by the polygon). The map will still respond to dblclick and zoom in, but this may be avoided by cancelling the propagation of the dblclick-event of the polygon.
It wouldn't be possible to gray out the dissabled area, but you could use the fillColor of the polygon to signalize which part of the map is disabled.
The question is pretty descriptive.
I am working on a website that provides locations for filming.
All the data in the site is currently stored in a MySQL database including geocode data for google maps.
I need to show polygon areas for the different london boroughs that has locations.
I have all the data as kml files, idealy i would like to store this in the MySQL database.
I have had success using fusion tables to display this data, but it seems silly to me to have to have this data duplicated on google just to use a fusion map layer, can i simply use a kml layer to render this data rather than having to create a fusion table and rendering it from that?
If so, is there a resource someone could point me to for more information?
UPDATE:
Thank you for the responses so far, i thought i would update the question with a little more info .
I eventually want to have all the areas displayed at the same time on my map and then when an area is clicked on ideally it would take you to another page on the website showing locations for that specific area.
I had initially tried using KML layers but i was getting errors saying my KML was invalid.
The KML was initially stored in a field in my database table, i think probably the errors were due to me not understanding exactly how google read in the KML data.
Using polygons would be far simpler to implement as i can get this data via JSON and then render the polygons from that.
I know now its not possible to have info windows with polygons, but i would just prefer to jump directly to another website page with info for that particular area using a click handler rather than show an info window.
Alternatively as suggested showing a tool-tip with a brief description of the area and a link to the page would be better, how the tooltip itself, is it possible to render on top the map?
I am slightly worried that I will reach the layer limit for the KML.
Is it possible to have multiple polygons rendered with KML on one layer, or do i need a separate layer for each clickable area?
The Google Maps API provides a pretty straightforward method to draw polygons.
Basic Example:
var polygon = new google.maps.Polygon({
map: your_google_map_instance,
paths: array_of_latlng_points,
fillColor: "#336699",
fillOpacity: .5,
})
EDIT: For this approach, you would need to parse your KML files (sorry, must've missed that when I first read it). You can import the KML files to a KML layer
You can overlay Polygons using KmlLayer, FusionTablesLayer (as you know), or native google.maps.Polygon objects.
KmlLayer and FusionTablesLayer render them as tiles, so for lots of Polygons (if you only need click events) will be more efficient. There are limitations on the number of KmlLayers that can be displayed on the map at one time and on FusionTablesLayer (but those don't seem to be causing you problems).
There are also third party parsers available for KML (geoxml3, geoxml-v3) which will take your KML and render it as native google.maps.Polygon objects. For lots of Polygons, this will be less efficient than tile based rendering, but it does allow mouseover/mouseout, and changing the properties of the Polygons dynamically.
You could also try data layers what have lots of events so you can display tooltips, info window, status text on various mouse events.
See samples in documentation:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/datalayer
If you have many polygons (where the actual value of many depends on multiple factors, can be anywhere between 100 and 1,000) the best is to use a built in layer type. The fastest are the ones rendered on server, e.g. kml layer because this doesn't create hundreds of DOM elements in browser but still exposes click events so infoboxes can be displayed for each item.
In the worst case you can implement your own rendering with an image map, obviously by using an existing library like mapnik.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/maptypes#ImageMapTypes
Objective: I'm trying to trace the NYC Boroughs in an overlay to google maps.
Issue: I can't find a proper shape. If i go to google maps and search for Bronx, I will get a nice outline of the Bronx. My problem is none of the shapes in the google documentation seem to fit with what i'm trying to do. The best match looks like a polygon, but that doesn't work well with all of the borders because of all the jaggedness. I'm trying to use overlays because I need them to be clickable
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=manhattan&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x89c2588f046ee661:0xa0b3281fcecc08c,Manhattan,+New+York,+NY&gl=us&ei=thEQUISLBO610AG4qYDYCA&ved=0CKkBELYD
vs
http://jsfiddle.net/xHKB7/5/
I don't need to individually trace each island, as what I'm doing is not that precise - but if you look at queens i don't see how i can reasonably use a polygon to capture this shape
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=manhattan&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x89c2588f046ee661:0xa0b3281fcecc08c,Manhattan,+New+York,+NY&gl=us&ei=thEQUISLBO610AG4qYDYCA&ved=0CKkBELYD
I've tried starting at the center, and then tracing the border because i've found this to give me the best detail from all sides, but it obviously leaves this ugly line.
http://jsfiddle.net/xHKB7/6/
FusionTables contains some data that might be useful to you:
Bronx - from New York State counties
Richmond Cty (Staten Island) - from New York State counties
(from this page)
Not sure if this is any better than the one you drew.
I'm working on a project where, after creating some nice code for creating polygons and attaching mouse events to them, the addition of KML layers (mainly placemarkers) results in uncooperative behaviour between the placeholders of the KML layer and the generated polygons.
If I create the polygons first and set the KML file afterwards, clicking on the placemarkers brings up the infowindow () as expected. However, mouseovers on the polygons below yield no result, whereas before they get highlighted and are clickable (which they aren't).
Setting the KML layer to null doesn't help either. The placemarkers disappear, but my polygons aren't registering.
When I first call the KML with placemarkers, the polygon layer called later goes on top of the placemarkers. The polygons are opaque, so you can see the placemarkers like you could through a window, but you can't click or interact with the placemarkers.
Setting the polygons to null results in the same behaviour as before. Placeholders still cannot be clicked on.
Help? I couldn't find a zIndex reference for the KML layer code, and I'm hoping that's all it is. I read somewhere else - and imagine this to be true - that the KML and user-gernated content "layers" are conflicting with one another - the latter one that's put on the map takes focus, captures events, etc. I would've thought that it wouldn't matter, in the same way that you can have divs on top of other divs, especially if you use indexing.
If you simply want to display the information in the KML layer and not have it react to user events, you can add the suppressInfoWindows flag to the constructor:
var myKmlLayer = new google.maps.KmlLayer('http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ggeoxml/cta.kml', { suppressInfoWindows: true });
This will effectively shut off all interactions and let your other layers receive interactions.
Edit: Forgot to mention that a good source of information is the Google API V3 site discussing KML layers