Map View Enhancements

[cannibalflea]

I’ve been really happy to see the map view added to fibery. I wasn’t sure how we could share our feedback on suggested improvements, so please let me know if I should post this to the original request.

Layer Order
It seems the order in which the datasets are added determines how they are rendered (which seems logical). However, it seems there is no option at the moment to re-order the layers (in the same way we can elsewhere in fibery). This would be really helpful as the only way to re-order now is to delete a layer and all the other customizations.

Clustering Control
I think clustering is a great option to have available but it would be nice if you could turn it off in certain cases. I find applying colour settings to a layer disables clustering, so I’ve been using that as a workaround.

More Symbology Options
I know the intent isn’t to use fibery as a full-fledge mapping tool, but it would be great if you had some more symbology options. The main things would be marker type, size, colour, opacity, etc. . I think this might need a bit of a rethink of the default “Colors” menu to allow for selection of the point marker

Auto Populate Colors
One of the things that I find really hard is setting up all the marker colours one by one when you are symbolizing using a category (single select field in fibery): For example:

So I was going to suggest providing an option to generate the colour rules based on options from a single-select options and colour settings. The user would select the field and press a button to generate the rules. The colours are automatically chosen based on the single select colour. The user then has the option to make changes to the rules, delete rules or add new ones. This would be super helpful for maps but I also think interesting for other views as well.

Collection map view within entities
It is really helpful to be able to add a map view to entities to visualize locations of the collection fields (e.g. a collection of stores managed by a franchisee). However, it seems the extents of the map view are static, i.e. while the collection is a dynamic list which will have items in various pockets of points, the map extent (and zoom level) don’t adjust for this. This is really confusing for users. It would be great if there was an option that could enable zoom to extents.

Having a button to “zoom to extents” would also be helpful in the map view.

Single location view
When users enter a location in the location field, there is no way for them to be able to visualize the location within the entity field. Map views require collections which makes it hard to verify that the location input is correct. It would be great if you could have a map widget that would visualize a particular location field within the entity view (either in the sidebar or the main area).

[Polina_Zenevich]

Hi!
Many thanks for the really great feedback!

Need to be honest - at the moment we don’t plan to improve Map view.
But I noted your feedback and updated the backlog for the future

[T_A]

@cannibalflea I figured out an interesting workaround to the single location view problem. not perfect but it works. you can reference your db to itself with a many to one relationship and have it automatically link to itself. Then in the entity view you can show a Map view for this field that is filtered to show only itself, if that makes sense. result looks like this. btw, i used AI buttons on the right to extract street address information and create google map hyperlink

[cannibalflea]

Very interesting solution. It does work.

I use a similar approach to confirm locations using Google Maps. However, I just use a formula field with the following formula:

"http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=loc:" + ToText(Location.Latitude()) + "+" + ToText(Location.Longitude())

Assuming Location is the name of the Location Field. If you set the formula field type to URL, then it will give you a hyperlink to Google Maps. You might also be interested in this discussion we are having to make these types of hyperlinks easier to use.

This might help you to avoid having to run a separate action

[cannibalflea]

I also wanted to add another enhancement idea to go along with this request:

@cannibalflea

Layer Order
It seems the order in which the datasets are added determines how they are rendered (which seems logical). However, it seems there is no option at the moment to re-order the layers (in the same way we can elsewhere in fibery). This would be really helpful as the only way to re-order now is to delete a layer and all the other customizations.

Ability to turn layers on or off
When using maps that have multiple layers, it is often quite helpful to be able to turn layers on and off for better visibility. This avoids the need to create multiple map views and help users to better understand the context. This setting should be available to all users and not affect the underlying data, filtering or colour settings.

It can be implemented inside the layer’s menu, but it might be more intuitive to have this integrated as a legend control (see below).

Add legend control
It would be great if creators had the option of displaying a legend to make it easier for users to understand the colour settings. Users unfamiliar with fibery’s colour menu will have a bit of a hard time understanding what each colour symbology represents. A legend would make this information available right away when a user is looking at the map. A legend is not always helpful, so it would be great if it was something that could be turned on when needed by the map creator and be collapsible by all users who want less clutter.

[carson]

The ability to create geometries on top of the map would also be amazing. Or in general, a geometry polygon GeoJSON database field would be cool. That’s probably possible right now with a text or rich text field, but some polygon databases can be gigabytes large, and I assume the Fibery Document is not a good place to store those (even if it’s just for static retrieval, not any type of querying).

I guess, maybe a binary file on the entity would be best in that case.

For the record, I’m not planning on doing this - I dont want to abuse Fibery’s storage generosity. But I did look into whether it would be a solution for us.

Interested in the team’s thoughts about this, and what Fibery’s architecture and business model can support. Storage is the cheapest piece nowadays, isn’t it?

[cannibalflea]

Not sure if this might be of interest to you:

[DONE] Geospatial fields

The way I have been trying to get around this issue is by building a small mapping tool where you can create a map (including adding some popups and controlling basic styling) and the URL-encode it so that you can save it in a URL field in fibery. It is based on leaflet and the leaflet-geoman library with a few additional tools. I’ve got some information and details on how to use the tool below in case it is of interest:

Toolbar Explanation

<a class="lightbox" href="https://gl…

Totally agree that GeoJSON isn’t the most useful way of storing spatial data (a PostGIS database might make the most sense since I think fibery uses Postgres under the hood). The sample I shared above tries to get around the verbose nature of GeoJSON by compressing it so a simple map can be transmitted using URL parameters.

However, I do think one of the advantages of GeoJSON is that it works really well for mixed/schema-less data where the primary objective is to produce a visual map, which might be of most value to fibery users.

One of the other things that would be super nice is the ability to add additional background layers (which are hosted elsewhere). Most mapping libraries allow this, so it just needs the UI to set them up. I think this would eliminate the need for bringing large spatial datasets into fibery itself.

Great to see a few map-nerds on the community