Supporting a custom feature format

You can specify a custom Codec instance for the majority of the Store implementations in the LuciadRIA API. The Codec converts a server-specific or file-specific data format to the LuciadRIA Feature interface, and the other way around. See the Introduction to feature (vector) models tutorial for more information.

The structure of a Store that uses a Codec for the interpretation of the data ensures a clean separation between the actual client-server communication and the server-specific format logic. Supporting more formats becomes a matter of writing new codecs without the need to re-implement the communication protocol with the server.

For example, if you want to support a WFS server that serves data in several formats, create a codec for each of those formats. Then, set that custom codec on a WFS store. You don’t have to implement the WFS communication protocol again, because you can re-use the existing WFS store WFSFeatureStore.

The samples contain a custom Codec implementation: see the samples/createedit/CustomJsonCodec.js file.