Esri / esri-leaflet-vector

Display ArcGIS Online vector basemaps w/ Esri Leaflet
Apache License 2.0
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Add hitTest function for vector tile layers #217

Open gowin20 opened 7 months ago

gowin20 commented 7 months ago

Describe the problem

Querying the attributes of a vector tile layer is a popular workflow that is very clunky in Esri Leaflet Vector. You can currently query layer attributes, but you can only do so by manually accessing the layer._maplibreGL._glMap and using functions from MapLibre GL JS.

Not only is that confusing and unintuitive, it is also tricky to document and relies on developers having an understanding of a different, unrelated mapping library.

Describe the proposed solution

I would like the ability to query the attributes of a vector tile layer using a new method specific to the layer.

The ArcGIS JS Maps SDK just added support for VTL hit tests as a method of the map object: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/layers-vectortilelayer-hittest/

MapLibre GL JS also supports this as a method of the map object: https://maplibre.org/maplibre-gl-js/docs/examples/queryrenderedfeatures/

^ this method in MapLibre is how I am currently querying vector tiles in Esri Leaflet, by calling layer._maplibreGL._glMap.queryRenderedFeatures(). I would like to add an exposed method to the vector tile layer class that invokes this MapLibre method under the hood.

Desired implementation: const features = layer.hitTest() //features contains the returned maplibre features

Alternatives considered

No response

Additional Information

Here's another example of using the underlying maplibre map for a different purpose (styling the layer): https://developers.arcgis.com/documentation/mapping-apis-and-services/maps/basemap-places/#filter-places-by-style-category

This is a similar workflow that has to access the same private data variable, definitely not best practice either. And unfortunately not resolved by this feature request :(