MarkerOptions about android-maps-utils

[ericpanorel]

Checkout the demo CustomMarkerClusteringDemoActivity
In there:
1.) A custom renderer is set

 mClusterManager.setRenderer(new PersonRenderer());

2.) And then, inside the renderer, the method "onBeforeClusterItemRendered" was implemented to tweak the icon.

[ryust]

I don't want to just tweet the icon... I keep track of maker data with the title and snippet attributes. Also, how do I define the anchor? Or a flat marker? There really should be a way to pass MarkerOptions to a ClusterItem instead so that markers can be created as before. This would allow developers to more easily integrate the clustering utils into existing apps.

[ericpanorel]

To track any data associated with the marker, it is best to create a hashmap of marker ID vs. you data model, the best place to implement this is also in the renderer class by implementing the method:

@Override
protected void onClusterItemRendered(Person person, Marker marker) {
    super.onClusterItemRendered(person, marker);
    markerPersonMap.put(marker.getId(), person);
}

When implementing the method, onBeforeClusterItemRendered, you have MarkerOptions object passed in as the second parameter. You can then modify it from there.

markerOptions.title("Blah")
                      .snippet("some property from the first parameter object...")
                     .flat(true);

[ryust]

Gave it the college try, but got too cumbersome particularly if you want an option to turn off clustering. It would be soooooo much better if this was designed more simply and integrated into existing maps code so that you could do something like this (and ONLY this):

clusterManager.addMarker(markerOptions); // versus mapView.getMap().addMarker(markerOptions);
clusterManager.removeMarker(marker); // versus marker.remove();

This way clustering could very easily fit into existing implementations without tons of retooling.

[broady]

You can still add a marker to the map directly.

map.addMarker(markerOptions)

Does that help?

[cowboycoder]

While you could do this by implementing a CustomRenderer as ericpanorel noted above, I found it simpler to modify the utility library to allow the setting of MarkerOptions on a per item basis.

I added a new method on the ClusterItem interface, that supplies the MarkerOptions about to be applied

void applyMarkerOptions(MarkerOptions opts);

Then call this from the DefaultClusterRenderer, line 793, before the call to onBeforeClusterItemRendered()

++ item.applyMarkerOptions(markerOptions);
onBeforeClusterItemRendered(item, markerOptions);

Then your implementation of MyClusterItem can store the options you want applying, and apply them as needed.