I am trying to learn how to use the Javascript library leaflet along with d3 to create various map visualisations.
I have been following this tutorial which creates a choropleth map of the United States with some interactivity. This provides some of what I need, but the main functionality I want is to have a list of lat/long coordinates classified according to which region they belong to.
This would mean, in the tutorial map for example, if I had a lat long value (55, -3) which fell within the state of Arizona's polygon, the program could classify this point as belonging to Arizona.
Is there a function in the leaflet (or d3) library which will allow me to enter a lat long coordinate as a parameter and return the name of the feature it belongs to? The tutorial above allows you to attach a function to every feature via the onEveryFeature property and can fire mouseover events when each feature is hovered over. Surely there is a way to extend this functionality to numerically entered data instead of mouse points?
Leaflet would need some tweaking if you wish to do this. It leaves the handling of mouseclicks to the browser and therefore does not need logic for determining if a point lies inside a polygon.
I am not very knowledgeable about d3 but it's not glaringly obvious to me how it'd do this out of the box. Looking at the polygon code, I do find a clipping algorithm and intersection of infinite lines.
If you add a third library, however, this should be rather simple.
The OpenLayers Geometry library can determine if a point lies inside a polygon.
EDIT: I got this to work, see also http://jsfiddle.net/VaY3E/4/
var parser = new OpenLayers.Format.GeoJSON();
var vectors = parser.read(statesData);
var lat = 36;
var lon = -96;
var point = new OpenLayers.Geometry.Point(lon, lat);
for( var i = 0; i< vectors.length; i++ ){
if(vectors[i].geometry.intersects(point)){
alert(vectors[i].attributes['name']);
}
}
Or you could use https://github.com/maxogden/geojson-js-utils , a bit more specific library. It looks like it knows how to read GeoJSON and it has a method gju.pointInPolygon
. I've not tested it though.