RandomEtc's dashboard

congratulation !

Perhaps you could explain why you want a UIComponent rather than a Sprite? If it's because you want to use the layout features in Flex so you can have a complex marker then I would be concerned that the measure and layout phases won't get done on the UIComponent marker if it's added as a child of a Flash object, a Sprite.

An alternative might be that Flex markers are added to the Flex Map (com.modestmaps.flex.map), thus leaving the Flash side (com.modestmaps.map) Flex free? I think this would mean having marker management code in the Flex map to reposition the Flex markers when the map pans, zooms or resizes? But I think this could be implemented outside of the modestmaps too.

I see. Thanks for the clarification, I see now that you can't use UIComponents as markers with the existing classes.

It seems like the main thing you need is a MarkerClip that extends UIComponent – it doesn't need to be a child of Map though, just on stage with the same parent (so the positioning works correctly).

I just checked in a quick change to Map and MarkerClip so that MarkerClip takes care of provider changes for itself. Now the only thing that Map does for MarkerClip is turn captured mouse events into MarkerEvents – you could dispatch those from your marker clip UIComponent instead and set them to bubble, and you wouldn't need Map to know about MarkerClip at all. This is the way we'll be going with future versions because we have different kinds of custom overlays for all our projects and MarkerClip is just an example really.

I know two ways to add a Sprite as a child of a canvas (or anyother Container) :

1. create a wrapper
   var comp:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
comp.addChild(new Sprite());
canvas.addChild(comp)


2. or Simpler
   canvas.rawChildren.addChild(new Sprite());

But I want to use a UIComponent as marker... So marker's parents (MarkerClip -> Map -> MapComponent -> ... -> Application) must be UIComponents (in my mind).

Sorry if I seemed a bit abrupt, above, I was in a hurry. Let me know if there's anything you need to know about Map or MarkerClip, or deeper in TileGrid etc. I'm happy to help!

I'm interested in knowing more about how Flex does things - is there a particular reason that the MarkerClip needs to be a UIComponent? I know that if you add a Sprite as a child of a canvas then you get a run-time-exception. Can you help us out by explaining a bit about what UIComponent gets you otherwise?

I don't know a lot about Flex but composition is the way to go otherwise it breaks compatibility with Flash and pure as3 projects – there's no need to do that.

MarkerClip is extremely loosely attached to Map, it's really just a convenience. You can create your own marker clip and add it as a child to map, and attach markers to markerclip directly, and it figures out the rest. We do this for layers of markers.

I would make a UIComponent with a Map as a child, and a UIComponent with a MarkerClip as a child, and then expose the methods you need as conveniences or just make them public.

There is some basic Flex work in the modest maps source tree already, and it would be great if you could fix/extend that as part of what you're doing. Note that the flex stuff in the svn trunk has had some fixes since we branched, so you'll want to look there as well as in the tweening branch.

The solution works. I though there was a problem with my transformation, didn't realized i have to manually set the center. Nevertheless, thanks RandomEtc :)

Now, my journey continues. on with markers!

You might have a problem with the area of the mapCanvas that will pass on mouse events to the map. I don't know enough about flex to debug this one, but in my test version the map was only receiving mouse events when it was inside a 640x480 box in the top left of the canvas. Just wanted to let you know.

You need to set the center/zoom of your map to somewhere in Malaysia...


map.setCenterZoom(new Location(5.85,102.2),4);


Something like that.

The scrolling behaviour is sometimes a bit buggy with small maps, but once you're zoomed in it should be good.

This is my code for AppMapProvider

package
{
import com.modestmaps.core.Coordinate;
import com.modestmaps.geo.LinearProjection;
import com.modestmaps.geo.Transformation;
import com.modestmaps.mapproviders.AbstractZoomifyMapProvider;
import com.modestmaps.mapproviders.IMapProvider;

public class AppMapProvider
extends AbstractZoomifyMapProvider
implements IMapProvider
{
public function AppMapProvider() {
super();
defineImageProperties("assets/maps/kelantan/", 17838, 25119);
var t:Transformation = new Transformation(756450.7712843401, 3644.341432354724, -1338060.2062059199,
-43447.93954501639, -721762.9126014732, 157382.51588980394);
__projection = new LinearProjection(15, t);
}

override public function toString():String {
return "APP_MAP_PROVIDER";
}
}
}

And this is the Index.mxml for loading the map and uses my AppMapProvider per above.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:application>

<mx:script>
<![CDATA[
import com.modestmaps.extras.MapControls;
import com.modestmaps.geo.Location;
import mx.core.UIComponent;
import com.modestmaps.Map;

private var _map:Map;

private function init():void
{
var mc:MapControls = new MapControls(_map, true, true);
var ui:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
ui.addChild(mc);
mapCanvas.addChild(ui);
_map.setCenter(new Location(0,0));
}

private function mapCanvasInit():void
{
// create map
_map = new Map(mapCanvas.width, mapCanvas.height, true, new AppMapProvider());
// add to map canvas
var ui:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
ui.addChild(_map);
mapCanvas.addChild(ui);
}
]>
</mx:script>

<mx:canvas height="100%" width="100%">
</mx:canvas>
</mx:application>

This is the mapping that I've used.

What you're seeing is the correct behaviour for the current version of Modest Maps.

The double dash is because it is asking for images with negative coordinates. At zoom level 0 there is only one tile: column 0, row 0, or 0-0-0.jpg

So the tile to the left of it will be 0--1-0.jpg and the tile above 0-0--1.jpg – of course these tiles don't exist, but the provider tries to load them anyway. It's not considered a bug because most of the time you'll zoom in somewhere inside tile 0-0-0 where all the tiles will exist.

It's only a problem if you're not seeing *any* valid tiles. Are you setting the initial center/zoom of your map to somewhere inside of the area with tiles? If not, it will default to Location(0,0) and not show anything. When I tried your code without specifying a projection in the provider, I could pan and zoom around the map just fine, but it did still show x's – I didn't think this was a problem.

If you want to stop it from trying to load tiles outside of the map, you'll need to override some of the functions in the map provider so that they don't load images that don't exist. You can also easily override paintError to not paint crosses, which is easier (but the 'bad' requests will still be made).

Hi Guys,

I tried again based on the lat and log I obtained from getlatlon.com, and record it in the calculator and using the zoom based on the log computation. But it still seeing X. I'm out of idea why this is happening.

When I checked the log file, the application is searching for non-existing images and it is always from TileGroup0. I has no idea why this is happening. Besides, why does at time the images filename has double dash (--), instead of one. When I inspect the tiles generated by Zoomify, i dont see any double dash.

Can someone assist me on this?

127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--41-4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--40-4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--39-5.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--39-6.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--42-4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--42-5.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--43-6.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:46 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--42-6.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--41-3.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--40-3.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--39-3.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--43-3.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--42-3.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--39-4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--41-5.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--40-5.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--41-6.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--43-4.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--40-6.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2008:01:08:47 +0800] "GET /modestmaps/assets/maps/kelantan/TileGroup0/0--43-5.jpg HTTP/1.1" 404 252

Hi again,

Will try to get the correct lon and lat.

On slightly different topic, how do i produce large image file? i'm trying to export some map in flash format (.fla) to image, but i couldnt export it if it is above 2880 pixels.

if i convert to illustrator format and try convert it to jpg, i will always have the out of memory error. my computer is running 2.4Ghz, 2Gb RAM

How do you produce such a big file

Hmmm. Well, we are definitely always wanting to make using our system more clear, but I wonder if this is something that is common. I have had a few folks who have not understood how to reply, but I haven't yet had someone who started a new topic every time they wanted to reply! I have, however, seen users who post multiple times to try and get a company's attention, and when that happens I usually step in and explain it to them -- that we don't encourage multiple posts of the same topic.

It does seem like something that seems very straightforward to me, but, I am admittedly biased. Maybe a "Need more help" button would work?

BTW, always feel free to flag these things, and I can help out.

If you're seeing requests for 0-0-0 and its immediate neighbors, that's fine even if they don't exist. As Tom says, check those lat, lon values!