Dynamic Graphics Part 3 - Tips+Tricks+Advanced

Here is a new video on using Dynamic Graphics in GTViewer.  This video is Part 3 and covers Tips, Tricks, and Advanced Features.

Dynamic Graphics Part 2 - Dynamic Highlights

 

Here is a new video on using Dynamic Graphics in GTViewer.  This video is Part 2 and covers Dynamic Highlights.

Dynamic Graphics Part 1 - Dynamic Labels

Here is a new video on using Dynamic Graphics in GTViewer.  This video is Part 1 and covers Dynamic Labels.

Beta version of GTViewer 15 is Available!

GTViewer for Windows version 15 is ready for Beta Testers. If you would like to try the new GTViewer, please contact support.

It has been a while since a major version of GTViewer for Windows has been released.  This delay has mostly been because the demand from customers has been focused on updates and enhancements to GTViewer for iOS and Android.  Nevertheless, there have been 53 incremental versions of GTViewer since version 14 was released.

GTViewer Version 15 has several fixes and many enhancements.  The major ones are listed below.

• Session Manager – If you have several sessions open at one time, you now get a Session Manager dialog when you exit.  It will show you all sessions that are currently open, their status (saved/not saved), and lets you flip between them so you can identify which one is which. You can dismiss sessions by saving them or not, or you can dismiss them all with one button press. You can also get to the Session Manager from File/Session Manager.
  

• Display Control Dialog – This new feature is a replacement for the Display Filter dialog used to control which features are displayed in the active view.  The original Display Filter dialog is not going away, but you will now have an alternative. The new Display Control dialog no longer does anything with Filter Ids.  Its primary tab uses the Feature/Component model used by many of the Add-On applications to turn features on and off. A Category tab is provided to toggle Categories on an off so you can easily just work with Categories (which many users do). The Preset tab from the Display Filter has been moved over, and a new tab for Display Toggles has been added so that you can use Toolbar style Display Toggles as a standard part of the display controls. Display Toggles turn on/off a select set of features whereas a Preset sets the whole set of features to a preconfigured display setting. The new Display Control dialog is also non-modal, so you can do stuff in the view and leave it up (something the Display Filter cannot do).

• Line Style Rendering - In the past there were some problems with dashed lines and User-Defined Linestyles when you had certain types of Arcs. This has all been resolved (finally after15 major versions!).  The overall appearance of dashed lines has been improved as well.

• Query Indexes – If you have a Locate Query that takes a long time to run, you can now add
  Indexes that should significantly improve performance.

• Locate Query Highlight Modes – For a Locate Query, you can now choose between Persistent Highlight, Non-Persistent Highlight (new), Persistent Box (new), and Non-Persistent Box (new). 

• Reload Command – This feature is found under File/Reload and will be useful to those who setup or configure the data.  It will save redlines (if any), close the session, then reopen it and reload any changes you made to the configuration files.
  

• GPS Tracking – GPS tracking will now work more efficiently when you have multiple datasets open and you want to track in all of them.

• API Enhancements - New functionality from GTViewer has been exposed to the External Applications so they can now do things like Preset Building and Finding Features by Key or Type.  A Find Feature app has been added using this.  The QueryBuilder and ToolTipBuilder both have a new Find Feature command so you don’t have to start from a selected feature anymore.

The GTViewer Add-On Applications have also been updated and new ones have been added as well.

Query Builder

The Query Builder is used to interactively create a Query Definition file inside GTViewer. The biggest new feature in this update is that you can do a Feature Search (by Filter Id, Feature, or Feature/Component) and it will locate a feature to start the Query Builder.  Before you had to select a feature of the type you wanted to create a query for to start the process (which was sometimes hard to do). There are a few more features added to the Query Builder to support new functionality in the Queries, like new Highlight Modes, and updates to the Feature Selection dialog was also updated (to match the one in the Dynamic Graphics interface).

Tooltip Builder

The Tooltip Builder is used to create Feature Tooltip definitions to display specified information when you hover the mouse over a feature.  It has been updated with the same Feature Search functionality that the new Query Builder has, so you can now either select a feature in the graphics to start it or do a feature query. Feature Selection dialog was also updated (to match the one in the Dynamic Graphics interface).

Preset Builder

The Preset Builder is a new Add-On.  It will let you interactively create the Preset Definition Files for use with GTPreset.  You can now set the view like you want with the Display Control or Display Filter and extract the current settings as a Preset Definition. This ability makes it significantly easier to create the Preset Definition files (which you had to do manually in the past), and you never have to use Filter Ids again.

Find Feature

This Add-On is like the Feature Search command that was added to the Query Builder and Tooltip Builder, except that it is a stand-alone app and has a few more features.  It is targeted for the administrator users who configure the dataset and is very useful when setting up freshly exported data.  It can also find any feature in the data by its keys.

Dynamic Graphics Interface

The Dynamic Graphics Interface allows you to configure the Dynamic Graphics (Highlights and Label) interactively.  This update has been completely rewritten and provides a much cleaner and informative interface.

Get Imagery 

If you have a Bing Maps or Google Maps
subscription where you can download static map images for use in Applications, this Add-On will fetch the background imagery and attached to the current view.

Search Redlines, Show Google Maps, and GTSpot Importer are still available.

The Where Am I app has been retired since its functionality was incorporated into GTViewer.

Dynamic Graphics in GTViewer and GTVx

Introduction

Version 10 of GTViewer and GTVx provides an exciting new feature called Dynamic Graphics which gives the user a powerful visualization tool for analyzing data, creating more informative or alternate views of data, and giving the user the ability to explore various decision making aspects of the data they already have. The Dynamic Graphics functionality uses a set of rules to generate new graphics on-the-fly from a variety of sources including a feature’s attribute values, the current zoom level, and even the presence of other dynamic graphics. The goal of the Dynamic Graphics functionality is to provide an easy way to generate thematic maps, feature labels, and analytical constructions in both an ad hoc manner or as prepackaged queries delivered with a dataset. The end result is data for your users that will enhance their productivity and ability to make decisions in the office or in the field.

History

The beginnings of the Dynamic Graphics functionality first appeared in Version 9 of GTViewer as the Dynamic Highlighter. This tool provided a significant amount of functionality for performing thematic queries whose results were shown by highlighting features meeting specified criteria. The highlight color was determined by one of the feature’s attributes value and looking up the value in a specified color map. The original purpose of the Dynamic Highlighter was to help identify a specific circuit on a map containing many circuits drawn in the same area all with the same style (color, weight, and linestyle). The Dynamic Highlighter gets a particular attribute on a feature, looks that value up in a color map (which maps a set of values to corresponding colors), and then highlights the feature in that color (appearing that the feature of interest changes color). Now, a single circuit in the view is easily identifiable amongst many other circuits. Color coding all circuits is also possible if an attribute is available to drive the color of the highlight. Many other applications of the Dynamic Highlighter quickly appeared such as showing circuit by phase, circuit by high or low voltage, gas pipes by pressure or material, and many more.

While being a very powerful tool, the Version 9 Dynamic Highlighter has some limitations. It can only look at a single attribute of a feature when determining the highlight color. Often, this single value was enough to do the job, but sometimes you needed several attribute values to determine the color or more complicated computations that go beyond a value lookup in a color map. Work-arounds for this problem are available, but they usually required creating a View in the GIS to create a single value for the highlighting task which hindered the “ah hoc-ness” of the functionality if the views were not already created. The interface for the Dynamic Highlighter was also a little primitive. Its rules could be defined as entries in the in the GTM file and methods were provided for External Applications to load new rules from a file. The Dynamic Highlighter was not supported in GTVx either. In the end, the Version 9 Dynamic Highlighter turned out to be more useful to the design of the new Dynamic Graphics functionality than it was to the Version 9 user base; nevertheless, it laid a down a good foundation for the next generation and greatly contributed to making Version 10 the best yet.

Dynamic Graphics

In Version 10 of GTViewer, the new Dynamic Graphics functionality provides a significantly enhanced version of the Dynamic Highlighter seen in version 9 plus a completely new Dynamic Labeler. A user-friendly Interface is also provided to configure the Dynamic Graphics rules. Now, users can quickly and easily create thematic queries or labels on-the-fly without the need to add entries to a configuration file or even need to know what the configuration files contain.

Dynamic Highlighting

The new Version 10 Dynamic Highlighter contains many new features:

• One or more feature attributes can now be used in expressions to define a filter criteria which determines which features will get highlighted and to define a Map Value which will be used to look up the highlight style. Previously, only one feature attribute could be used and its value had to appear in the highlight style map.

• The Highlighted Elements that get produced by the Dynamic Graphics are no longer limited to just being a different color. Weight and Linestyle can now be specified.
  
  
• The Highlighted Elements can now be set to behave like regular elements in the Emphasize Session Graphics mode (which typically gray out when active). This ability to masquerade the highlighted elements as regular elements adds a new dimension to what can be done with highlighted elements since the original GIS features can be hidden and the Dynamic Graphics can provide an alternate view of the features.
  
  
• The Dynamic Highlighter provides 2 modes of operation. The regular Highlight mode provides the full set of functionality utilizing a Color/Weight/Linestyle map to assign highlight styles according to an evaluated Map Value. A scaled down mode called Simple Highlight is also provided and simply highlights all features meeting the filter criteria using the same Color/Weight/Linestyle setting which eliminates the need to configure a Color/Weight/Linestyle Map for simpler Actions.
  
  
• Dynamic Graphics is now supported in GTVx as well as GTViewer.
  
  

Dynamic Labeler

The Dynamic Labeler is the second half of the Dynamic Graphics functionality, and it does precisely what its name implies. The Dynamic Labeler generates labels for point, line, and area features using a set of rules. Depending on the type of label desired and the type of geometry it will be created for, many different options are available to specifying the label. The “Dynamic” in Dynamic Label pulls double duty since the labels are generated on-the-fly from the features in the current view, and can also take into account what parts of a feature is actually displayed in the view. For example, centering a label on a line that is 75% out of the view would likely produce a label you would not see since the center of the line would be outside the view, but the Dynamic Labeler can clip the geometry and only use the part that is in the view keeping the label displayed. Much more effective labels can be generated for an ever changing view. Our previous approach to generating labels that were not part of the source GIS was to use the GTLabelGtg tool (part of GTData) to build a nice set of labels for a dataset. These labels are static and will always be the same size and in the same relative position regardless of the view extents. The Dynamic Labeler can be configured to create similar static labels, but its power comes from its dynamic capabilities which simultaneously create more useful labels and a more aesthetically pleasing map view.

Dynamic Label Examples

To illustrate what the Dynamic Graphics functionality actually does, pictures are worth a thousand words.

The screenshot below shows 3 lines that use a Dynamic Label. In each line, the segment containing the mid-point of the line is found, then the mid-point of that segment is used as the origin for the label:

The Dynamic Labeling supports a Static placement mode (like GTLabelGtg would produce) and the screenshot below shows how the label behaves in the static mode when the lines are partially moved out of the current view:

The topmost line has its label go out of the view, and the bottom two lines have their labels moved to the edge of the screen.

In the screenshot below, the dynamic placement is active and the labels are placed more intelligently by only using the parts of the lines that are currently visible:

The example below shows a rotated "V" shape line that is fully in the current view. Here the line gets one label:

However, if the line is moved partially out of the current view, two separate lines are left and each gets a label of its own:

A more realistic example is shown below. Street centerlines are labeled with information from the database (the street name and street type) and a variety of rules are used to create a usable view: duplicates are removed, labels that overlap other labels are removed, and labels that are longer than the street segment they are associated with are removed.

In the screenshots below, the primary conductor feature is labeled with its Circuit Name, Phase, and Voltage in Red text:

Dynamic Labeling is not limited to lines. Both Point and Shape features are supported as well. The following screenshots show how Shape elements can take advantage of the dynamic label placement:

The topmost screenshot above shows two shapes in the current view with a Dynamic Label placed at the centroid. The lower left image shows how static labels will be have if the shapes are moved partially out of the current view, and the lower right image shows the same view with the dynamic positioning turned on (which uses the centroid of the visible parts of the polygons).

Dynamic Highlight Examples

A Dynamic Highlighting example is shown in the screenshots below where the gas main features are highlighted according to the feature's Pressure attribute values:

The topmost screenshot above shows the regular view of a gas network. The middle screenshot shows the gas network with Medium Pressure main colored Orange and Low Pressure main colored Blue. The bottom screenshot shows the highlighted gas mains with the emphasize mode turned on so that the Highlighted results are easier to see.

In the screenshot below, electric facilities are colored by their phase (A is Red, B is Green, C is Blue, and Orange is multiple).