dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx>]

It's very cool to see the progress Jan and Tri are doing on the GIS module,
the exports to Excel is very nice, and so is the one to PDF which preserves
the layers. Inspired by StatPlanet which I also think we should add as an
output option for DHIS2),  http://www.sacmeq.org/statplanet/StatPlanet.html,
I am testing the GIS module with world maps.

Unfortunately, when generating GeoJSON from shapefiles with many polygons
the result easily becomes very big (http://mapshaper.com/test/demo.html can
alleviate that), but here is a world geojson file that is only 150 kb:
http://thematicmapping.org/data/json/internet_users_2005_choropleth_lowres.json


(discovered at this helpful blog:
http://blog.thematicmapping.org/2008/04/thematic-mapping-with-geojson.html)

There is a job to be done to verify this file with the ones used by WHO -
ISO country codes should be added, and the names of some countries need to
be changed. Probably some boundaries are also wrong. I will look into these
issues when/if people would like to use this module for more official maps,
in which case we also need to extend the export with ability to add a logo
and disclaimer and maybe a few simple layout choices.

Some issues:
- It is not allowed to use 0 for latitude or longitude, even though this is
the default value. Any reason to not allow that?
- For a world map one would want to select a zoom level less than 5 which is
currently the limit.
- When there is no data for a polygon, it should be rendered without fill
color, just boundary.
- The PDF export should include a legend (I think this was recently added in
Mapfish)
- When trying to export the whole world to an image, I get this message (it
works if I zoom in to just a few countries):

Problem accessing /dhis-web-mapping/exportExcel.action. Reason: Form too
large470782>200000

With this small file, things seem to work even in Internet Explorer, and not
only IE8 but even the horrible old IE6 which won't die...(I see no point in
going to IE5, but it would be good totest IE7 also, which I don't have
available right now).

So we are definitely on the right track. I would like to set this up as a
demo with some global data, would be nice to be not have to require a login.

Knut