[OpenLayers-Users] question

[Ondra Zara]

Hi Christopher,

> 
> I'm very sorry to hear that -- hopefully we can work out why this is
> happening and help you fix it.
> 

thanks very much for assistance provided.

> 
> It seems that the only reason for this problem must be related to some
> change in your code, but I'm not sure what it would be -- and it seems
> likely that it's a bug in OpenLayers, because no matter what, you
> shouldn't be able to cause the problem you did.
> 

I strongly agree with this :)

>> 2. Is it somehow possible to offer an API which can be used locally (and 
>> modified, debugged etc.)?
> 
> Absolutely. The reason for the obfuscated code, which is obviously
> making your issue more difficult to debug, is that it makes the download
> much quicker, but when in development, this is obviously not neccesary
> given the difficult it causes in debugging.
> 
> You have several options: 
>  * Download the 1.0 release: http://openlayers.org/download/OpenLayers-1.0.tar.gz
>    Inside the release, you will find a 'lib' directory, with an
>    OpenLayers.js inside of it. If you put this entire directory in
>    someplace that is web accessible, and then change your 
>    /api/OpenLayers.js URL to point to the locally hosted
>    lib/OpenLayers.js version, you will be using a version of OpenLayers
>    which is split into multiple files and is not obfuscated.
>  * Use the Development version: At all times, the most recent version of 
>    OpenLayers (bugs and all) is available from /dev/lib/OpenLayers.js.
>    This version is, like the release, not obfuscated. However, this
>    version should not be used for production: it changes rapidly, and
>    changes in the short term are occasionally not backwards compatible,
>    nor are all the kinks neccesarily always worked out.
>  * Download a local copy of Subversion: Using a subversion client, you
>    can download the OpenLayers code directly from
>    http://svn.openlayers.org/trunk/openlayers .
> 

I will certainly try this!

> Unfortunately, I must admit that attempting to debug this with the
> compressed version of the OpenLayers code is very difficult, especially
> given the complexity of your application. However, I would like to help
> you see this resolved, so if you can move to a non-singlefile version of
> the OpenLayers code somehow, we can look further into why exactly this
> might be happening.
> 

I have to say I have quite some experience with finding bugs in 
obfuscated code; we use also Google, Yahoo and MSVE mapping providers 
which provide *no* support, so I have to solve most issues just by hand.

I am not a big fan of multi-file API: we already use this approach with 
our libraries and this causes many problems, especially in IE when page 
is a results of XSLT processing: IE often fires onload() event even when 
not all JS files have been already included.

Nevertheless, I will surely try to download a local version (obfuscated 
or not) and find the problem there.


Thanks,
Ondrej Zara