Reading and creating features from a WKT
As we're already discovering, OpenLayers comes with a great set of format helpers, which are used to read/write from/to different file data formats. GeoJSON, GML, and KML are some of the many available formats that we already explored.
If you read the Adding a GML layer recipe in this chapter, you will know that a vector layer can read the features stored in a file, specify the format of the data source, and place the contained features in the map.
For this recipe, we will programmatically create a polygon in the WKT format and then export the feature as WKT from the vector layer. You can read more about the WKT GIS format on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-known_text). The source code can be found in ch03/ch03-wkt-format/. Here's what we'll end up with:
How to do it…
Create a new HTML file with OpenLayers dependencies. In particular, add the HTML to create the map and side panel, as follows:
<div id="js-map"></div> <div>...
