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Support for Mapbox Vector Tiles

#1

Hello,

do you plan to support Mapbox Vector Tiles anytime soon?
Thank You.

Regards,
Peter

#2

Hi Peter,

As you probably already know, we do have support for MapBox raster tiles. However, vector tiles are a much more complicated scenario when using data from another vendor because their styling would have to be duplicated in a WPF environment.

Have you looked at using ThinkGeo Cloud for vector tiles in WPF? The Cloud uses OSM data, but styled with our own system that works in Desktop, Web and Mobile. And integration into your app is just a few lines of code.

If ThinkGeo Cloud is not a good fit, I can add the request to support MapBox vector data to our enhancement tracker and we can evaluate the level of effort it would take to implement.

Thanks,
John

#3

Hello John,

thank you for your answer.

Other products (even from ThinkGeo, and some OS libs for WPF) are supporting MapBox Vector Tiles, so I do not see your point about it being “complicated”. Actually to be able to control the styling is one of the most interesting things about Vector Tiles.
At least in Germany Vector Tiles are getting more and more important, so it is very unfortunate that ThinkGeo does not see the opportunity.

Your reference to ThinkGeo Cloud is nice but not helpful for us as our solution has to work with map services provided by the federal government of Germany. Our customer requested the use of Vector Tiles for years and we have been putting them on hold for all this time now but they are getting impatient as their other Open Source web tools are all supporting MVT now.

So please add it to your enhancement tracker so that there is hope that someday ThinkGeo will support it.
Thank you.

Regards,
Peter

#4

Hi Peter,

I’ve confirmed this issue is in the enhancement tracker and will discuss with the product team. Before I meet with them, I had a quick question. You mention that:

Other products (even from ThinkGeo …) are supporting MapBox Vector tiles.

Where have you seen this? Are you referring to WebApi/Openlayers? Or have you seen it elsewhere?

thanks,
John

#5

Hi John,

sorry for the delay.

I’ve seen the following Open Source projects (in addition to your own Openlayers) that support MapBox Vector Tiles:

So it is possible and would be a good improvement for ThinkGeo. Thank you for your support.

Regards,
Peter

#6

Thanks Peter,

I’ve created an enhancement ticket in our system and our product team will dig into this further.

thanks for all your help on this.

John

#7

Hi John,

do you have any news on this topic?
Our client is unfortunately getting “antsy” because so many other (especially Open Source) projects now support this.

Regards,
Peter

#8

Hi Peter,

Thanks for raising this again. As our new MAUI gets closer to a final release, this is near the top of our list for new features.

I do have a question though. After the MBTile data is loaded, would you prefer to programmatically style the data using the ThinkGeo styles (AreaStyle, TextStyle, etc.) that our other layers use, or does your use case need to include styling with the mapbox style specification ?

Thanks,
John

#9

Hello John,

that is very good to hear. Thumbs up!

Please publish a roadmap as soon as you reliably can, so we can give our clients one too. Thank you.

As our clients like to use other Open Source products for web mapping solutions (server and client side) it would be good to support MapBox as well as MapLibre. AFAIK they are not that far from each other.

Thanks,
Peter

#10

Thanks Peter,

I can confirm MAUI release is still set for May 1st and progress has been very good. After that, this will be high on the list, but I don’t have a specific date on when it will be complete.

We will keep you updated.

Thanks,
John