No software is an island. Integrating with other software opens up new possibilties. iShare integrates with many, many software packages. We also enable other systems to use your SDW via Astun’s Managed Integration Service.
However, many customers need a more customized integration. ol-ishare is an Astun JavaScript library which integrates iShare with custom web applications. If you want to create a web-based interface to iShare, ol-ishare has all the flexibility you’ll need.
We have built custom ol-ishare applications ranging in complexity for a wide range of customers:
- Mapping energy supply and demand for the Scottish Government
- Saving lost footpaths with the Ramblers
- Spatializing local government consultation for Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council
Learn how to build a simple iShare-integrated web application in our new how-to.
What is ol-ishare?
ol-ishare is a JavaScript library which provides access to an iShare profile. You can use it to build web applications which pull in information from your map layers, and to add extra functionality which iShare GIS and iShare Maps don’t provide on their own.
ol-ishare is based on the JavaScript mapping library OpenLayers, bringing modern web mapping to your iShare data.
The brief: integrating Drupal with iShare
A customer asked us to create a map for their schools directory. It would take data from their Drupal web content management system and generate on-the-fly maps. This customer was very technically adept, and their web team had already implemented a web application to query the schools database, and return a list of school IDs which matched the query.
So the plan is to create a webmap with the schools layer displayed, as per the screenshot at the top of this article. If a school ID, or list of school IDs, is in the querystring, filter that layer only to display those schools. The customer’s web developers can then generate links to the map with the relevant IDs, and use that map in an iframe alongside the tabular results of the query.
Now find step-by-step instructions in the How-To section of the iShare Help site
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