Other new things (or things I forgot to talk about) in Fusion for MapGuide 2.6

This post has been stuck in my draft queue for several months now. I guess I forgot about this post so some of the content in this post may have already been talked about. Still, there some content here that I'm certain hasn't been talked about, and since I currently don't have idea at the moment what has and hasn't been talked about, I've decided to just publish the whole post.

So here's some new features (or features I've probably already talked about) in Fusion for MapGuide Open Source 2.6

OpenLayers updated to 2.13.1

OpenLayers in Fusion has been updated to the latest stable release, which is 2.13.1. This gives us important fixes for tiled layers in IE10, among other fixes and improvements from the 2.12 release.

Short of a few specific customizations to the Google layer (to disable tilt at lower levels), you'll be glad to hear that the OpenLayers included with Fusion is now mostly vanilla with very few modifications. Making your own custom OpenLayers build should be a painless affair.

Built with Closure

fusionSF-compressed.js is now built with the Google Closure Compiler.

Besides giving us a 50kb reduction in file size over YUI compressor with default settings, building through Closure gives us Source Map support for modern browsers.

What this means is you can now debug and step through fusionSF-compressed.js in its uncompressed form with full comments without having to modify the template files to switch to a debug version of Fusion. Current versions of Chrome and Firefox both support source maps in their respective developer tools.

With advanced optimizations, fusionSF-compressed.js file size can be reduced by up to 500kb! Unfortunately, building with closure's advanced optimizations may actually alter application behaviour and requires a thorough audit of the code in Fusion first before we can determine if it is safe for us to flick the switch. So for now, we build with default settings.

Delayed refresh on layer/group toggle in legend

When you toggle a layer or group on/off in the legend, it triggers a map refresh. If you do this on multiple layers/groups in quick succession, it's going to fire off that many refresh requests. Not very efficient.

For this release, we've added support for a new DrawDelay extension property in the Map element of the MapGroup. Setting this property will cause any toggle in the legend to delay the refresh for that amount of time (in ms).

Having this property set will allow you to toggle multiple layers/groups in the legend in quick succession, but only trigger a single refresh request at the end as long as each individual toggle falls within the delay period. This feature is opt-in. By default, the delay is 0 which means legend widget will behave like before where each toggle triggers a refresh immediately.

More QuickPlot tweaks

The legal disclaimer is now a configurable element

Of course, you may want this element to be mandatory, so we've added a new AllowDisclaimerToggle extension property that determines whether this checkbox will be shown.

In addition, you can configure the initial checked state of these elements through the following new extension properties:

• ShowLegend
• ShowNorthArrow
• ShowCoordinates
• ShowScaleBar
• ShowLegalDisclaimer (does nothing if there is no legal disclaimer attached or AllowDisclaimerToggle = false)