Working With Layers

Spatial data can show the location of a huge variety of data including buildings, roads, rivers, political boundaries, and natural features such as peaks. This data is held in files, databases, and on the Internet. BlueSpray works with this data in "Layers" that are placed in a "Scene".

Types of Layers

There are different types of layers available in BlueSpray. If you are loading data that only contains the coordinates of a point such as the locations of trees or cities, you'll want to load it into a "Point Layer". If you have data describing rivers, roads, railroads, and water ways that are described by a series of points, you'll want to load the data into a "Vector Layer". Outlines of lakes, countries, and other polygonal areas are also stored in "Vector Layers". Data that resembles digital photographs such as aerial and satellite images, will be stored in "Raster Layers". There are different file formats and transforms available for each type of data but BlueSpray makes it easy to use the correct ones.

Loading Data

The most common way to load data into BlueSpray is to right click on a "Scene" and then select "Import". Browse the the file you'd like to open and click "Open". BlueSpray supports a range of file formats and will just load the file into a new layer and display it automatically. You may be asked for some additional information based on the type of file you are opening. You'll see the layer appear under the "Scene" in the Project tree and be displayed in a new view in the main window of BlueSpray.

Changing Layer Settings

You can now right-click on the layer and see all the options that are available for the layer. Right-click and select "Settings..." to edit the name of the layer. Most settings that are available to you for each layer (and pretty much every object you can see in BlueSpray) is available through a settings dialog.

Transforming Layers

All the processing functions available for a specific type of layer are available by right-clicking on the layer and then clicking on "Processes". Select the process you desired, set it's settings, and click "OK". All processes except the fastest will display a progress dialog while they are processing. You can start as many processes as you like and you can keep using BlueSpray as the processes run. You may see a red circle with a slash through it appear as a process runs. This means the process is currently working on the data in that layer and you won't be able to interact with the layer until it is finished. When the process is complete the red circles will disappear and your view of the data will show you the new data.

Viewing Layers

You can open multiple "views" of scenes by right clicking on a scene and selecting "New View...". Move the view around by selecting the "Hand" tool and clicking and dragging in a view. With the magnifying class, you can click to zoom in, <control> click to zoom out, and you can draw a box to zoom into a particular area. Select "Zoom to Layer" by right-clicking on a layer to see the entire layer again.

Creating New Layers

Right click on a scene and select "New Layer..." to see the options for importing data from databases or creating new, empty, layers. Select one of the drawing tools to add data to a layer. Most tools will work with all layers but they the data they create varies by the type of layer. See the tutorials on Digitizing Vector Data and Editing Raster Data for more information.

Exporting Layers

Once you have created, edited, or processed a layer you can either save it to the same file name as before or you can select "Export" from the layer's popup menu to save it to a new file. Just type the file extension of the file format you'd like to save the file in (i.e. "shp" for Shapefile format and "tiff" for Tagged Image File Format).