Tiled Maps without the Internet

This is one of those things that’s obvious once you know it, but I’ve often found myself developing code for tiled maps, but without a connection to the Internet. Often, I just want a quick check to see if the tiles are rendered correctly, so I don’t need the background map.

The obvious solution is to create an OpenLayers page with your custom tiles as the base layer. The javascript that makes OpenLayers work can be served locally, unlike the Google API, so by only having one layer of locally served tiles, you don’t need an Internet connection.

The html pattern follows the OpenLayers ‘howto’ guide and uses a custom TMS layer as follows:

var googlecustom=new OpenLayers.Layer.TMS(“Test”,http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/googlemaps/,{ ‘type’: ‘png’, ‘isBaseLayer’: true, ‘getURL’: TMSCustomGetTileURL });

The ‘TMSCustomGetTileURL’ returns the tile url based on the x, y and z value in whatever format you are storing tiles in. For this project, it was the keyhole string format.

OpenLayers map showing the BBC Look North Recession data using dynamic tile creation — OpenLayers map showing data from the BBC Look North Recession mood map using dynamic tile creation

The image above was taken from a prototype system using C# and SQL Server 2008 to generate tiles dynamically from data stored in a CSV file at a URL.

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