Our experience with Custom Feature Layers

[MGWobrock]

Hi there,

I am currently working on an app that allows users to maintain short time road restrictions by using XDatas custom feature layers (for example when there is a construction site).
To give a quick overview of how we are planning to use it, you can click this .gif:

Demonstration

You can see the result here:

Result

I wanted to give some constructive feedback on the functionality of XData, and would be happy to hear your thoughts.

1.) IMO the best way to select the affected segments in our use case is a combination of XRoute>calculateRoute and getSegmentsByIntersectingPolyline. This requires some additional computing since getSegmentsByIntersectingPolyline also returns segments that are adjacent to the original route. Being able to easily retrieve all segmentIDs of a given route would be very nice.

 2.) Apart from using timeDomains, the maintenance of singular Features is not possible by default. It is only possible to delete a whole featureLayer, not single Features. For our use case, we need to maintain a database with all features. Whenever an existing one is deleted/edited, we collect the features from the database and overwrite the existing FeatureLayer.

3.) Given a specific SegmentID, it would be nice if we were able to request information to this segment, for example, it's Polyline.

Overall I think the XData has interesting features and I really enjoy working with it.
Let me know what you think of these suggestions.

Best Regards

[Bernd Welter]

Hello Gerrit,

thanks for your feedback about the experience you made with xData and the Custom Feature Layer (CFL)- this is appreciated and I will forward it to our development and product management.

Here's also my personal feedback to your bullets:
1. how to gather the segment IDs of specific route? Well, for this you'd simply need to calculate the route and request the segment info from xRoute. At least I hope this does what you asked for.

Route computed on xRoute2 (HERE)

2. recreation of complete CFL required each time a single feature changes: you are right. That's a weakness of the current design. The approach forces each player who wants to maintain CFL for an individual database where he stores at least SegmentIDs and "features of the segments" and then to dump the data into a CFL whenever a single value changed. Not nice. Unfortunately required at the moment. (You could also store the selection criteria to ensure that the dump process also works fine after a map update.)

3. Data of a segment based on ID: A good idea. I'll forward this to DEV as a feature request!

So far for the moment - many thanks for the feedback!

Bernd