New release of MapStore with Charts and Revised Filtering

Dear Reader,

we are pleased to announce the release 2018.01.00 of MapStore, our flagship Open Source webgis product. The full list of changes for this release can be found here, but the most interesting additions are the following:

• Charts: you can now add charts to your maps for data analysis.
• New Simplified Query Builder with Cross Layer Filtering: support for cross layer filtering from the query builder.
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements.

More on charts

With this release we added an important data analysis tool that can enhance your maps with useful data. MapStore now allows to quickly generate charts (pies, lines, bars, gauges) from layer’s data. Using GeoServer‘s powerful services, you can aggregate data and add them to the map. You can play with this map to get a feeling about this new functionalities.

You can create a chart, and add it to the map, directly from the Table of contents, as shown below.

Every chart can be configured to be in sync with the map viewport, that means the data will be filtered using the current map viewport. Chart will then update everytime you pan and zoom the map to reflect the data that falls within the viewport.

Chart sync with Maps

You can even provide additional filters using the query builder to refine the data that powers your charts (see below).

More work is planned on the Charts functionality to provide additional chart’s types and enhance the current ones. We also aim to add more elements that go beyond pure charts hence we decided to call these elements widgets, to account for future additions.

Revised Query Builder and Cross Layer Filtering

You will notice a new look and feel for the query builder.

New look and feel for query builder

Filter all roads that intersect New York’s Central Park

In addition, now you can filter data using the geometries from another layer of the map using the brand new “Layer Filter”. Select the layer you want to use as filter and the geometric operation to match data. In addition you can add an attribute filter to the filter layer too.

This greatly increases the analysis possibilities. You can simply find the roads that intersect New York Central Park (like below) or make more complex filters combining cross layer, spatial filter and attribute filter.

This feature can also be used to filter the data for the charts, so you can generate charts directly from the data filtered using the cross layer.

Advanced filtering, data aggregation and charts makes MapStore a useful tool for data analysis and visualization that goes beyond pure maps. For the future releases we plan to enhance these functionalities with new widgets and new analysis features.

News for developers/custom projects

The developers will notice we changed the build files and documented more the application to support the following functionalities:

• JS/CSS versioning: now javascript and css are loaded by version, so if you’re doing hard client side caching you don’t need to empty the browser cache to see changes anymore. Learn how to migrate your project here.
• Configurable and Documented I18N: now you can configure the languages you want in configuration file. Learn How

You can also refer to the MapStore developer documentation to learn more about this feature.

Future work

For the next releases we plan to (in sparse order):

• Improve existing charts and add new widgets (text, counters and statistics, dashboard…)
• Integration with GeoNode
• Integrated styler for GeoServer
• Support for layers with TIME
• Support for more general map annotations, beyond simple markers

Stay tuned for additional news on the next features!

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 GeoServer Deployment Warranty offerings, feel free to contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,