Random Nodes

Kenneth Skovhede recently announced the official release of MapGuide Maestro 2.0, the culmination of over a year of feature development and usability enhancements to the open source MapGuide authoring tool. Here are my picks for the top 10 features of MapGuide Maestro 2.0:

1. Theming, with ColorBrewer Suport

Being able to theme maps based on data distribution is a basic mapping function, and this release of Maestro delivers. Adding support for ColorBrewer means that you can be confident that your colour scheme is visually distinct and cartographically appropriate for the message that you are conveying. The Maestro UI automatically constrains the colour choices based on the underlying data categories:

2. Expression Editor

MapGuide and the underlying FDO data providers support a powerful expression language, and previously you were on your own to write valid expressions. Thanks to Jackie Ng, MapGuide Maestro was able to use the same expression editor that FDO Toolbox is using, giving expression-completion, valid value extraction, and more:

Check out Jackie’s posts on the FDO Expression Editor and the follow-up where he talks about the addition of value auto-completion.

3. Resource Validation

The Maestro resource validator walks from application to map to layers to data, warning if it detects any common errors such as broken references or potential performance issues like unmatched projections. This is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting problems in your maps:

4. Improved XML Editor

While Maestro’s GUI is great for most purposes, there are times when you need to access the full power of MapGuide XML configuration syntax, like when you’re editing complex XML-based stylization elements. Maestro makes it easy for you to edit any resource as XML simply by right-clicking on it and choosing “Edit as xml”. Maestro 2.0 comes with many improvements to the XML editor, including validation against the schema, cursor position (important when tracking down errors), and the ability to attach arbitrary files to the current resource, which is critical when making bitmap-based symbols:

5. Profiling

Profiling allows you to easily find the performance bottlenecks on a given map, or quickly determine whether changes to theming or other items are having an impact on performance:

6. Package Management

MapGuide packages are a zipped export of the DBXML repository including XML resources, associated binary files, and a manifest. Typically these are managed on the server, but Maestro allows you to create, edit, and load these files via the GUI. This can be really handy when you’re migrating changes between servers. One of my favourite tricks is to export both test and prod as packages, unzip them, and compare using Beyond Compare (not free, but worth every penny).

7. Custom Resource Templates

Any time you are creating a new data source, layer definition, map definition, etc, you are basically just creating a new XML document. If you find that you are always performing certain steps as part of creating these resources, you can create your own custom resource types with customized versions of these XML documents. For instance, I like to start layer creation using the version 1.3 of the LayerDefinition schema, with a default scale range of 1:1->1:500,000, and none of the feature types being displayed. All I had to do was create a new LayerDefinition with these settings, save it to the MapGuideMaestro\Templates directory with a name like “Nanaimo Layer.xml”, and it shows up when I want to create a new resource:

8. Duplicate Resource

This might not seem like a big deal, but when creating dozens of similar layers it can be a huge timesaver. Simply right-click on any resource and choose “Duplicate” and a copy of that resource is created and ready for you to customize:

9. Colour-Coded Resource Tree

When editing many resources at once, things can get a bit confusing. Crispin Hoult from 1Spatial contributed a feature that colour-codes currently open resources in green, and resources that have unsaved changes in pink. The currently active resource comes up in a darker shade. This feature makes it much easier to keep track of what’s going on in your work area, and is surprisingly useful:

10. General Usability

OK, maybe this doesn’t count as a feature, but a LOT of thought has been put into how various user interactions work, and countless small refinements have been made. A few examples:

• inserting a new layer into a map definition when you have a group selected inserts the layer into that group, and places the layer into the overall draw order right after the bottom-most layer in that group
• you can now right-click on any resource and copy its ID (like Library://Nanaimo/Data/MyFile.FeatureSource) to the clipboard, which can be incredibly useful when writing code to access resources
• you can multi-select many layers for insertion into a MapDefinition at once
• maestro keeps track of references when you rename or move resources, prompting you for whether you want dependent resources updated

All of the little enhancements in this release added together have saved me hours of work (I’ve been using the pre-release versions for a few months).

All-in-all this is a very impressive release, with countless new features and enhancements to existing functionality. Give it a spin, and I’m sure you’ll turn up your own favourites!

Thanks Kenneth, and great work.

-J