overview.md

@deck.gl/mapbox

Use deck.gl layers as custom Mapbox layers, enabling seamless interleaving of Mapbox and deck.gl layers.

Advantages and Limitations

Advantages

• Mapbox and deck.gl layers can be freely "interleaved", enabling a number of layer mixing effects, such as drawing behind map labels, z-occlusion between deck.gl 3D objects and Mapbox buildings, etc.
• Mapbox and deck.gl will share a single canvas and WebGL context, saving system resources.

Limitations

• deck.gl's multi-view system cannot be used.
• Unless used with react-map-gl, WebGL2 based deck.gl features, such as attribute transitions and GPU accelerated aggregation layers cannot be used.
• Mapbox 2.0's terrain feature is currently not supported.

Installation

Include the Standalone Bundle

<script src="https://unpkg.com/deck.gl@^8.1.0/dist.min.js"></script>
<script src='https://api.tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/v1.10.0/mapbox-gl.js'></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
  const {MapboxLayer} = deck;
</script>

Install from NPM

npm install @deck.gl/mapbox

import {MapboxLayer} from '@deck.gl/mapbox';

Examples

Using with Pure JS

To create a Mapbox-compatible deck.gl layer:

import {ScatterplotLayer} from '@deck.gl/layers';
import {MapboxLayer} from '@deck.gl/mapbox';

const myDeckLayer = new MapboxLayer({
  id: 'my-scatterplot',
  type: ScatterplotLayer,
  data: [
    {position: [-74.5, 40], size: 100}
  ],
  getPosition: d => d.position,
  getRadius: d => d.size,
  getColor: [255, 0, 0]
});

To add the layer to Mapbox:

import mapboxgl from 'mapbox-gl';

mapboxgl.accessToken = '<your access token here>';
const map = new mapboxgl.Map({
  container: 'map',
  style: 'mapbox://styles/mapbox/streets-v9',
  center: [-74.50, 40],
  zoom: 9,
  antialias: true // Mapbox disables WebGL's antialiasing by default
});

map.on('load', () => {
  map.addLayer(myDeckLayer);
});

Using with React

import React, {useState, useRef, useCallback} from 'react';
import DeckGL from '@deck.gl/react';
import {ScatterplotLayer} from '@deck.gl/layers';
import {StaticMap} from 'react-map-gl';

import {MapboxLayer} from '@deck.gl/mapbox';

const INITIAL_VIEW_STATE = {
  longitude: -74.50,
  latitude: 40,
  zoom: 9
};

const data = [
  {position: [-74.5, 40], size: 100}
];

function App() {
  // DeckGL and mapbox will both draw into this WebGL context
  const [glContext, setGLContext] = useState();
  const deckRef = useRef(null);
  const mapRef = useRef(null);

  const onMapLoad = useCallback(() => {
    const map = mapRef.current.getMap();
    const deck = deckRef.current.deck;

    // You must initialize an empty deck.gl layer to prevent flashing
    map.addLayer(
      // This id has to match the id of the deck.gl layer
      new MapboxLayer({ id: "my-scatterplot", deck }),
      // Optionally define id from Mapbox layer stack under which to add deck layer
      // 'before-layer-id'
    );
  }, []);

  const layers = [
    new ScatterplotLayer({
      id: 'my-scatterplot',
      data,
      getPosition: d => d.position,
      getRadius: d => d.size,
      getFillColor: [255, 0, 0]
    })
  ];

  return (
    <DeckGL
      ref={deckRef}
      layers={layers}
      initialViewState={INITIAL_VIEW_STATE}
      controller={true}
      onWebGLInitialized={setGLContext}
      glOptions={{
        /* To render vector tile polygons correctly */
        stencil: true
      }}
    >
      {glContext && (
        /* This is important: Mapbox must be instantiated after the WebGLContext is available */
        <StaticMap
          ref={mapRef}
          gl={glContext}
          mapStyle="mapbox://styles/mapbox/light-v9"
          mapboxApiAccessToken={MAPBOX_TOKEN}
          onLoad={onMapLoad}
        />
      )}
    </DeckGL>
  );
}

Note that this usage pattern has a catch: the DeckGL instance does not know that it is sharing a context with Mapbox until map.addLayer is called for the first time. You may find the map blink due to competing rendering attempts between deck.gl and Mapbox if:

• map.addLayer is not immediately called on StaticMap's onLoad event
• map.addLayer is called, but an invalid beforeId is supplied that does not match any layer id in the loaded map style. This causes addLayer to fail.

If data layers are not immediately available when the component is mounted, you can work around this issue by:

const onMapLoad = () => {
  ...
  // Insert a placeholder layer to connect Mapbox to Deck
  // The id does not exist so it won't actually draw anything
  map.addLayer(new MapboxLayer({ id: "dummy-layer", deck }));
}

Injecting Layers into Mapbox

Adding a 3D deck layer

In this cases, the application wants to add a deck.gl 3D layer (e.g. ArcLayer, HexagonLayer, GeoJsonLayer) on top of a Mapbox basemap, while seamlessly blend into the z-buffer. This will interleave the useful visualization layers from both the deck.gl and Mapbox layer catalogs. In this case, the Mapbox map.addLayer(layer) API method can be used to add a mix of deck.gl and Mapbox layers to the top of the layer stack from the currently loaded Mapbox style.

Inserting a 2D deck layer before an existing Mapbox layer

One major use case for mixing deck.gl and Mapbox layers is that some important information in the Mapbox map is hidden by a deck.gl visualization layer, and controlling opacity is not enough. A typical example of this is labels and roads, where it is desirable to have a deck.gl visualization layer render on top of the Mapbox geography, but where one might still want to see e.g. labels and/or roads. Alternatively, the deck.gl visualization should cover the ground, but not the roads and labels.

A bit more control is provided by the optional before parameter of the Mapbox map.addLayer(layer, before?) API. Using this parameter, it is possible to inject a MapboxLayer instance just before any existing Mapbox layer in the layer stack of the currently loaded style.

Mapbox provides an example of finding the first label layer. For more sophisticated injection point lookups, refer to Mapbox' documentation on the format of Mapbox style layers, see Mapbox Style Spec.