MapGuide 4.0 Showcase: Transform all the things!

Did you know that MapGuide uses CS-Map, a coordinate system transformation library with support for many thousands of coordinate systems out of the box? No matter how esoteric the map projection your data is in, MapGuide can re-project geospatial data in and out of it thanks to this library.

So it is quite a shame that for the longest time, MapGuide's powerful coordinate system transformation capabilities has zero representation in any part of the mapagent (the HTTP API provided by MapGuide).

To use MgCooordinateSystem and friends (the classes that wrap the CS-Map library) requires building a your own MapGuide application using the MapGuide Web API in one of our supported languages (.net, Java or PHP) and having your client application call into your own MapGuide application. There is nothing out of the box in the mapagent for a client map viewer application to do a basic HTTP request for transforming coordinates or requesting feature data to be transformed to a certain coordinate system.

For MapGuide 4.0, we've exposed the coordinate system transformation capabilities in APIs where it makes sense. Such as our SELECTFEATURES APIs for returning feature data. In my previous showcase post, I've shown how appending VERSION=4.0.0 and CLEAN=1 now gives you an intuitive GeoJSON result for this API.

The coordinates are based on the coordinate system of the data source it comes from. In the above screenshot, this is latitude/longitudes (code: LL84, epsg: 4326).

Suppose you want this data in web mercator (code: WGS84.PseudoMercator, epsg: 3857) so you can easily plonk this GeoJSON onto a slippy map with OpenStreetMap or your own XYZ tiles, which would also be in web mercator. With MapGuide 4.0, you can now also include a TRANSFORMTO=WGS84.PseudoMercator parameter to your HTTP request and that GeoJSON data will be transformed to web mercator.

The other major capability gap is that the mapagent offers no API over the mapagent for transforming a series of coordinates from one coordinate system to another. For MapGuide 4.0, there's now a dedicated API for doing this: The CS.TRANSFORMCOORDINATES operation.

With this operation, simply feed it:

• A comma-separated list of space-separated coordinate pairs (COORDINATES)
• The CS-Map code of the source coordinate system the above coordinates are in (SOURCE)
• The CS-Map code of the target coordinate system to transform to (TARGET)
• Your desired output format of JSON or XML (FORMAT)
• If you want JSON, whether you want the pretty JSON version (CLEAN)

Invoking the operation will give you back a collection of transformed coordinates.

A place where this new API is sorely needed is MapGuide Maestro, which previously required kludgy workarounds for transforming bounding boxes in Map Definitions (when adding layers in different coordinate systems, or re-computing extents):

• Tapping into the MgCoordinateSystem APIs of the local connection mode (if available)
• Using an alternate library for transformation with less reliability due to smaller range of supported coordinate systems.

The next milestone of MapGuide Maestro will now take advantage of this new API for transformation when connected to a MapGuide 4.0 or newer server.