Openlayers Measure Line and Area at the same time from the same button

Question

I have been using separate buttons to measure lines and areas in my Openlayers maps (as per the Openlayers examples) but would ideally like to get the output for both length and area at the same time. The ideal solution would be to have a solid line for the line measurements and a dashed line connecting the start and end point to symbolize the polygon. Then simply output the two answers to a div on the website. As a bonus, store each line length in an array that can be output to a menu as well.

My question is two fold, is it possible, and does anyone have / know of an example? I've searched long and hard and can't find an attractive solution to this.

Thanks for your help,

Answer 1

This is a really specific demand so I doubt you will find an example that does exactly that. Your safest bet would be to extend OpenLayers.Control.Measure to do exactly what you want. It would take me some time to provide a working example so I'll let you do it, but you could do something like:

• Use the Measure tool to measure line
• Extend the class so it creates a polygon when you add a node (see the measurePartial function)
• Extend the measure function to send the length and area in the event or send 2 events if you prefer

Same thing to return the length of each line segment.