interaction for labels

[ansis]

map.featuresAt should include labels. or have a separate call for it.

[peterqliu]

Would really like this. It solves two problems with featuresAt(): picking up labels that aren't really there (https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-online/issues/675), and not being able to grab labels that ARE there (https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-online/issues/374)

[tmcw]

@ansis how deep is this issue? Where would a contributor start if they wanted to add labels to the rtree?

[ansis]

I think it might be sort of deep. The tricky thing is that labels have different sizes and different lengths along a line at different zoom levels.

CollisionTile already uses an rtree to index label positions for collisions. I think I'd extend CollisionTile to be able to return which CollisionFeatures are in the query box at a given zoom level. This would involve understanding how labels are represented for collisions and how CollisionTile.placeCollisionFeature works.

And then a bunch of work to integrate the new CollisionTile.featuresAt with FeatureTree.

[samanpwbb]

Any chance this could move some time in the next couple months? Are there any ways to temporarily hack around the issue? It's a pretty big usability knock for direct selecting -> styling. Users always expect to be able to click on labels.

[peterqliu]

Are there any ways to temporarily hack around the issue? It's a pretty big usability knock for direct selecting -> styling. Users always expect to be able to click on labels.

for /app, one hack is to call .featuresAt()a second time with a more generous radius, and filter for symbols only. Would probably be too slow for x-ray mode (since it's at risk for being laggy already), but okay for one-shot direct select.