leaflet-temporal-geojson

A somewhat unopinionated leaflet (v1+) plugin to animate GeoJSON features using an arbitrary time property:

• You decide how to change frames (event driven range slider components, methods calls, whatever 🤷‍♂️)
• You control feature styling (static, dynamic, whatever 🤷‍♀️)

how does it work

• features are clustered into layer 'keyframes' using supplied time property
• keyframes are rendered depending on time key
• features may have custom styles applied using properties

notes

• to improve rendering performance, points are rendered as L.circleMarker vectors using L.geoJSON's pointToLayer function (i.e. to avoid use of DOM <img> for markers)

install

npm install leaflet-temporal-geojson --save

development

npm install 
npm run build

use and options

See demo for detailed example.

const layer = L.temporalGeoJSONLayer({
 
  // which property to use for time (expects ISO 8601 string)
  timeKey: "time",
  
  // optional function to return style 
  // see path options: https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.6.0.html#path-option
  style: function(feature) { 
    return {}; 
  },
  
  // array of geojson features
  features: [
    {
      "type": "Feature",
      "properties": {
        "age": 1,
        "time": "2005-08-22T09:01:00Z"
      },
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates": [
          156,
          -45
        ]
      }
    },
  ],
 
  // OPTIONAL - supply the name of a custom pane,
  // will be created if doesn't exist, defaults to overlayPane
  // https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.6.0.html#map-pane
  paneName: 'myCustomPane',
 
  // OPTIONAL - additional options to style point data (e.g. radius)
  // this has lower priority than styles from style()
  // https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.6.0.html#circlemarker
  circleMarkerOptions: {},
 
  // OPTIONAL - renderer factory
  // One of: L.canvas, L.svg (defaults to canvas)
  // Note: L.svg is not recommended due to performance overhead
  rendererFactory: L.canvas,
 
  // OPTIONAL - callbacks when layer is added/removed from map
  onAdd: function(){},
  onRemove: function(){},
 
  // OPTIONAL - function to control feature popups
  // https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.6.0.html#geojson
  popupFunction(layer) {
    return `the time here is: ${layer.feature.properties.time}`
  }
 
});

public methods

method	params	description
getFrame		Get the current frame time (-1 if not set)
getFrameKeys		Get an ascending array of all ISO times (can then be used to call setFrame)
isActive		check if the layer is currently active on the map
setFrame	time: {string}	display the features at the given ISO time (if calling from something like a range slider, recommended to throttle - see demo).
setStyle	style: {function}	Changes styles of GeoJSON vector layers with the given style function. Set falsey for defaults.
getBounds	time {string}	Get the bounds at given time (falls back to bounds of current keyframe, and then bounds of first keyframe if not set).

example data

The included example data is fictional and intended for demonstration purposes only, however - if you're interested in marine connectivity modelling you should check out some of CSIRO's work on connectivity modelling here, and here.