Publishing the viewport and drawn areas

Two more channels from the map to the rest of the dashboard: what the map is looking at, and what you have drawn on it. Both are one-way, and both come with the same warning.

These are for the other panels

Put either value in this panel's own query and the map filters itself. The data shrinks to what is on screen, or to what is inside the shape — and zooming out or widening the shape cannot bring those rows back, because the dataset no longer holds them.

It is a ratchet, and it feels like a bug the first time it happens. The option is named Publish viewport (for other panels) for exactly this reason.

The viewport

Publish viewport (for other panels) names four dashboard variables — west, south, east and north — and the map writes the bounding box of what it is showing into them.

WHERE lng BETWEEN $west AND $east
  AND lat BETWEEN $south AND $north

Four numbers, not a geometry

Deliberately. Four numeric variables carry no injection risk into a consumer's SQL, where a free-text geometry would. There is nothing free-form for a consuming query to interpolate.

When it publishes

Once on load, so a consuming panel never opens without bounds and never runs its first query against four empty strings. Then whenever the map comes to rest — 300 ms after the last pan or zoom, so a gesture costs one round of queries rather than one per frame.

Values are rounded to six decimal places and compared numerically against what the variable already holds, so a view that has not really moved writes nothing. This matters more than it sounds: kepler's store wakes on every pointer movement over the map, and each write would otherwise re-query every panel that reads the pair.

Coordinates are clamped to the ones that exist. Zoomed far enough out the computed span runs past the antimeridian and the poles, and no consuming query should be handed a longitude of −250.

Practical notes

You can name fewer than four variables if your query only needs some of them — publishing is per-variable.

A consuming query that also needs to survive a first load before any value arrives should guard for the empty string the same way the other channels do.

Drawn areas

kepler's draw tool produces a polygon or a rectangle. Cross-filtering → Publish drawn area writes it to a dashboard variable as WKT in EPSG:4326, the moment the figure is finished — before you have chosen a layer for it, if you were going to.

WHERE $area != ''
  AND ST_Intersects(geom, ST_GeomFromText($area, 4326))

Use it unquoted, with a guard for the empty value.

The variable must be a text box — the value is free-form WKT, so a query or custom variable cannot hold it.

Three deliberate limits

Only the most recent figure is published. Draw three shapes and the variable holds the third. Deleting the last one clears the variable to the empty string, which is what the != '' guard is for.

kepler keeps no timestamps on its features, so "most recent" is positional: the figures arrive in a deterministic order and the last new-or-changed one wins.

The channel is one way. Editing the variable by hand does not draw anything on the map. There is no round trip.

The value is never written on dashboard load. A shared link keeps the area it was opened with, rather than having it overwritten by whatever the map restored from a saved configuration. The first pass only ever adopts what it finds.

What counts as a figure

Anything kepler's editor holds that serialises to WKT — a polygon or a rectangle. A shape that has been promoted into a polygon filter on a layer is the same figure under kepler's covers, and it is recognised as such rather than as a new drawing, so applying a drawn shape as a filter does not republish it.

Choosing between them

The viewport is coarse and automatic: it follows you around and needs no interaction. It suits "show me numbers for what I am looking at".

A drawn area is precise and deliberate: it is a shape you meant. It suits "show me numbers for this neighbourhood", and it survives panning, which the viewport by definition does not.

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Upstream: the draw tool itself is kepler's — Draw on map. Publishing what you draw to a dashboard variable is this plugin's addition.