Handling the layer order of groups of markers

[obezuk]

Hey Mapstraction Team,

Great work so far - I am wondering how I would go about layering groups of makers, or handling the Z Position of a marker?

I'm not sure if this has been requested yet, I haven't been able to find any existing issues or information in the documentation, so any insight would be much appreciated.

-- Tim

[vicchi]

This is a great feature request; both the Google and Nokia APIs support z-index ordering of markers but it's not part of Mapstraction at the moment. I don't think there'll be time to get this into the next release unless you happen to have a implementation handy, but this should definitely be looked at in more detail with a view to supporting it in the next-but-one-release.

-Gary

[obezuk]

Hey Gary,

As I'm working on a project utilizing Mapstraction, I would love to contribute back. I am new to the Mapstraction source. How would this feature be implemented, or what would the best approach be?

Would this be a feature we could implement for all API's regardless of their support as this is an aesthetic feature? Or would we write it only if the API supports it?

-- Tim

[vicchi]

Hi Tim,

This is great, we'd love to have you contribute and get involved. There's a wiki page with general guidelines for contributing source code to Mapstraction at https://github.com/mapstraction/mxn/wiki/Contributing.

For this particular feature, I think it'll need to be implemented in two places. Firstly in each provider's implementation file. So to add support for z-index ordering for Google v3, you'll need to enhance mxn/source/mxn.googlev3.core.js and so on for each provider.

But not every provider will support z-index ordering, but this still means than an empty stub, effectively a no-op will need to be added to those providers that don't support this.

Then secondly, the Marker prototype class in mxn/source/mxn.core.js will need to be enhanced to know about how to call the new feature(s) in the provider's implementation files.

Feel free to get in touch here or on the Mapstraction mailing list if you need more detailed help or guidance or just want someone to sanity check what you're doing.

Welcome to Mapstraction ... it's great to have you here.

-Gary

[obezuk]

Hey Gary, thanks for the information. It's very helpful. How regular is your release cycle? I think I'll have time to do this over this Christmas break.

-- Tim

[vicchi]

Our release cycle is somewhat ad hoc; if there's new code, new providers or bug fixes then basically we wait 'till there's critical mass and then release. That said, I'm trying to get the next release out before Christmas but as Mapstraction is purely a volunteer effort there's no hard guarantee. If you get this implemented, we'll get it released.

-Gary

[gilesc50]

Any luck implementing this feature?