Styling the Vector Layer

In the last chapter, you saw how powerful the vector layer can be. In this chapter, we'll go a bit deeper and talk about how to customize the appearance of the features within your vector layer. The way vector layer styling works is similar to how we customized the appearance of our control objects, but instead of using CSS, we use Style and StyleMap objects with the vector layer. We can style the vector layer this way because the vector layer does not use raster images—it uses SVG (or Canvas or VML) elements that can be styled, similar to how HTML elements can be styled with CSS.

Changing the feature styles, such as changing the color of our features from the default orange to blue, is quite easy. But changing colors of a vector layer's features is perhaps just one of the most basic things we can do. By using the Rule and Filter classes, we can specify how (and what) features should be styled. For example, we could color points differently depending on their geographic...