CARTO VL Airship bridge

Airship components are a great tool to build Location Intelligence dashboards, and CARTO VL an amazing tool for mapping. This library makes them work together easily.

What does this do?

Essentially, it lets you take your existing CARTO VL visualizations and easily connect them to Airship widgets. Namely, to the following:

• Histogram widgets (numerical & categorical)
• Time Series widget
• Category widget
• Range Slider, for a global range of a numerical value

As Airship expands and adds further components, expect them to get their respective filter here as well.

Because these connections can be read-only or allow filtering, they are called Filters, and are all orchestrated by a VLBridge object.

Histogram Filter

The histogram will get automatically populated and refresh when moving the map around.

Both numerical and categorical histograms are supported. You can use the histogram method with or without number of buckets, or you can use the individual functions numericalHistogram & categoricalHistogram.

Time series Filter

The time series bridge lets you display the progress of a VL animation on a time-series-widget and binds all the events to control it (seeking, pausing).

It will also automatically do the logic to play the animation when selecting a range.

Category Filter

Very similar to a histogram, but the data is displayed using an as-category-widget.

Global Range Filter

This lets you assign a Range Slider to a numerical column, and will set its range to the global min / max of said column, allowing filtering by it.

How can I use this?

A typical use of this library implies creating a new bridge for an existing layer:

const bridge = new AsBridge.VLBridge({
  carto: carto,
  map: map,
  layer: vizLayer,
  source: source
});

carto is your CARTO VL namespace object, which is required in order to create new layers. map is your MapboxGL map. We internally add a new layer, so we need a place to put it. vizLayer is your existing CARTO VL layer. source is the source of the aforementioned layer.

And then creating all the necessary filters:

bridge.histogram(timestampWidget, 'timestamp', {
  buckets: 30,
  source
});

bridge.histogram(surfaceWidget, 'surface', {
  buckets: 40,
  source
});

And then simply bundling it all together

bridge.build();

Be sure to check out our examples.

Usage from the CDN

Just include the following tag:

<script src="https://libs.cartocdn.com/airship-bridge/prerelease/asbridge.js"></script>

And start bridging your visualizations to your widgets.