[Users] storing extra properties on layers

[Andreas Hocevar]

Hi,

Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) wrote:
> I had a discussion with Patrick Valsecchi on the MapFish list a while 
> back about storing extra properties on an OpenLayers.Layer object (in my 
> case OpenLayers.Layer.WMS). I currently do this a lot, like metadataURL, 
> legendURL, the result of a WMS DescribeLayer request, or the result of a 
> WFS DescribeFeatureType request (i.e. the structure returned by the parser).
> 
> He says it's not done to store extra properties on an object from a 
> different library, and I can see his point.

I agree that it is important to have this metadata available somewhere, 
and I also have bad feelings about tagging properties to objects of 
foreign libraries.

> How do we plan to handle this in GeoExt? Do we create a Layers widget 
> which will hold this extra info and keep it up to synch?

Two alternatives come to my mind:

1) a LayerStore that is always in sync with the map's layers array. Its 
recors have a reference to a leayer, plus all this required information. 
It would also make things like LayerTree more convenient to develop/use, 
because we don't always need a reference to the map, just to our LayerStore.

2) a metadata property added to the OpenLayers Layer API, where everyone 
can store what they want.

Personally, I'd be in favor of 1).

Regards,
Andreas.

> 
> I'd love to hear some opinions on this. TIA.
> 
> Best regards,
> Bart
> 


-- 
Andreas Hocevar
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/
Expert service straight from the developers.