Overlay on the static map

This section explains how to overlay additional information onto static maps using Amazon Location Service. You can customize your static maps by adding various geographical features, such as points, lines, and polygons, to enhance the map's visual representation. Amazon Location Service supports multiple formats, including GeoJSON and a compact overlay format, to provide flexible and efficient ways of adding overlays.

With GeoJSON

GeoJSON is a versatile format that allows you to overlay custom data on static maps. By defining geographical features such as points, lines, and polygons, you can enhance the visual representation of your maps, providing valuable context for users. GeoJSON is widely supported and offers flexibility when it comes to styling and customizing map overlays, making it an ideal format for displaying regions, plotting routes, or showing spatial relationships.

With Amazon Location Service, you can leverage GeoJSON to add dynamic, location-based features directly onto your static maps. This enables you to create highly customizable overlays that can be tailored to meet your specific business needs. GeoJSON supports several geometry types, including Point, LineString, Polygon, and MultiPolygon, allowing you to display a wide range of features, from markers and routes to complex area representations.

Colors

When styling GeoJSON features, you have flexibility in defining colors. You can specify colors using different formats, such as hexadecimal values (like #ff0000 for red) or with alpha transparency (like #ff000080 for semi-transparent red). This ensures your overlays can be visually consistent with the map style. If no color is specified, the default color for the selected map style will be applied.

Drawing order

Custom overlays are drawn in a specific order to maintain clarity and avoid visual clutter. In Amazon Location Service, overlay features like polygons, lines, and points will appear above the base map, but below map labels. The drawing order prioritizes polygons first, followed by lines, and then points or markers.

Measurement units

For properties like width and outline-width, you can use different measurement units to specify size, including pixels (px), meters (m), kilometers (km), miles (mi), and percentages (%). The percentage unit adjusts the property relative to a default value, providing more flexibility in styling your overlays.

Geometry types

Amazon Location Service supports multiple GeoJSON geometry types, such as Point, LineString, Polygon, and MultiPolygon. Each geometry type can be styled and adjusted using the properties object in GeoJSON, allowing for extensive customization of markers, routes, and areas on your map.

With compact overlay

Note

Compact overlay supports the following geometry types: point, line, and polygon. It doesn't support multiPoint, multiLine, or multiPolgyon.

The compact overlay option allows you to efficiently display multiple geometries on a static map by using a single query parameter. This streamlined approach simplifies the request format and reduces the size of the request, making it easier to transmit overlay data. Customers can input various geometry types and their corresponding style properties in one query parameter, and Amazon Location Service will handle the heavy lifting by parsing and rendering the overlay as specified.

While using the compact overlay format, keep in mind that there are limits on the size of the request URL. Although Amazon Location Service optimizes the query, ensure that your request stays within reasonable limits, especially when dealing with multiple geometries and their associated properties.

Format

The compact overlay format is structured as follows: geometry_type:geometry;property_1=value_1;property_2=value_2|geometry_type:geometry;property_1=value_1...

Each geometry type is defined along with its style properties. Multiple geometries are separated by a pipe operator (|), and properties for each geometry are separated using a semicolon.

Supported geometry types

Amazon Location Service supports several geometry types, including Point, MultiPoint, LineString, Polygon, and MultiPolygon. These geometry types can be combined and styled within the same query parameter using the compact overlay format.

Styling properties

Each geometry can be customized using various style properties, such as color, outline color, size, and more. These properties allow you to control the appearance of each geometry on the map, ensuring that the overlay aligns with your business requirements.