Monday 16 February 2009

A bad relationship: Google Earth 5.0 & MapGuide 2.0.2

Something. Broke. Bad.

Those of you who have the latest and greatest version of Google Earth may find (like I have) that it doesn't like the kml that the current release of MapGuide is serving up.

Basically a GetMapKml call will fire up Google Earth, zoom to the region defined by the Map Definition, and that will be all she wrote. You'll see the map layers in the layers pane, but the features in those map layers do not get streamed across from MapGuide's KML service.

Unfortunately, Google Earth doesn't seem to have any useful way to diagnose Network Links and MapGuide's logs don't seem to reveal much useful information either.

I'm setting up a test matrix of various versions of Google Earth and MapGuide to see what more information I can ascertain. It would be nice to know what has changed with regards to Google Earth's KML handling since v4.3 (where this problem seems to have originated from)

UPDATE: It seems Google Earth is the offender here. (Thanks Jason!)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jackie, I've noticed that the first time I open the GetMapKml of Sheboygan, it doesn't load, not even with manual refreshes of the network links.

If I re-download the file, it displays (though after a brief delay) and so do the layers in the first file I downloaded.

Are you seeing the same symptoms? This is only my home PC running Apache; are you also using Apache?

Watching this in Fiddler2 (hint, you have to use your PC name, not localhost, for fiddler to view) the connections appear to be aborted on one side or the other, even though the packet appears to be valid.

With a little experimentation, I found that wrapping the GetMapKml call inside of a static KML file appears to work fine... I just don't get it. Do you have a version of MapGuide running publicly that serves KML?

Anonymous said...

Looks like this is a known issue now :)

http://code.google.com/p/earth-issues/issues/detail?id=21

Anonymous said...

Do I have to use all 3. Can I just use GetLayerKML and GetFeatureKML?

Iain Shaw said...

I am using Google Earth 6.1.0.5001 and mapguide 2.1.0 and I have the same issue mentioned in this thread of my shape file not rendering in google earth.

I see the feature and I get a line on my in the wrong place but when I zoom in onto that incorrectly placed line the line disappears.

Any thoughts?