MapStore Release 2020.01.01

Dear Reader,

We are pleased to announce the release 2020.01.01 of MapStore, our flagship Open Source webgis product. The full list of changes for this release can be found here, but the most interesting ones are described here below.

Important changes for this release

• Dashboard filtering capabilities: dashboards have been improved by including the possibility to define quick filters across different widgets. The online documentation is available here
• Various enhancements: the MapStore codebase has been improved to enhance WMTS support with Openlayers, the build process and the general error handling 
• Hardening: various bug fixes have been provided, the complete list is available here

Let us now go into more details about the new dashboard filtering capabilities. MapStore dashboards have been enhanced with the ability to filter widgets contents on the fly. The example here below show a simple scenario case built on top of data coming from one of our clients, special tanks to the Municipality of Genova for this. This dashboard shows the evolution of the Public Works in the city over time. The dashboard is also available in our MapStore live demo here (you can login with user demo  and password  123456).

Use case – Public Works in the City of Genova

You can now connect widgets also to a Table widget, not only to a Map widget inside the dashboard, as it was possible in previous versions of MapStore.

Connection of a widget to a Table widget

With this you can use the Table widget in order to filter other widgets connected to it. The Table widget for dashboards has been improved with a quick filter tool that is available for each attribute and allows you to filter records inside the table and connected widgets that are using the same dataset. The Quick filter automatically is enabled as soon as a widget is connected to the Table one.

Quick filter tool

What happens if you connect a Map widget to a Table widget and you apply a filter? It is simple, the map will automatically zoom to the extent of filter’s results and, if the Map contains the same dataset (WMS layer) configured for the Table widget, the layer in the Map will be filtered accordingly. The existing connection capabilities to Map widgets present in previous versions of MapStore are still availale. Through this simple and intuitive mechanism you can interconnect different kind of widgets in cascade to enrich your dashboard context.

More details on how this new tools works, can be found inside the MapStore online documentation.

New dashboard filtering capabilities – The classic States dataset

Ongoing and future work

For the next major release we will provide the best!

Application Contexts and Viewer Composer: as we anticipated in the previous blog post, an additional interesting feature will make MapStore even more powerful than now. The next major release (2020.02.00) will bring the new Application Context tool for MapStore that will allow administrators to define multiple viewer contexts in a three steps wizard. We made really interesting progress in the last couple of months, stay tuned!

Context Wizard – Map Editor

Context Wizard – Plugin Editor

Sharing a Context via URL

Storytelling tool: we made some fantastic progress also for the new geospatial storytelling tool that will be available in MapStore starting from the next major release: we named this new tool GeoStory and it is expected to be released for the next major release (2020.02.00) of MapStore. Below a quick preview of the work.

GeoStory – Map Tooltip component for Identify operations

GeoStory – Custom Theme Editor

GeoStory – Custom Editor for story sections

Stay tuned for additional news on the next features! If you want to play with the current release, you can access the live demo here and login with username demo and password 123456.

If you are interested in learning about how we can help you achieving your goals with open source products like GeoServer, MapStore, GeoNode and GeoNetwork through our Enterprise Support Services and Subscription Services offerings, feel free to contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,