jonykrause / PruneCluster

Fast and realtime marker clustering

PruneCluster is a fast and realtime marker clustering library.

It's working with Leaflet as an alternative to Leaflet.markercluster.

The library is designed for large datasets or live situations. The memory consumption is kept low and the library is fast on mobile devices, thanks to a new algorithm inspired by collision detection in physical engines.

Some tweets over the world

Features

Realtime

The clusters can be updated in realtime. It's perfect for live situations.

Fast

Number of markers	First step	Update (low zoom level)	Update (high zoom level)
100	instant	instant	instant
1 000	instant	instant	instant
10 000	14ms	3ms	2ms
60 000	70ms	23ms	9ms
150 000	220ms	60ms	20ms
1 000 000	1.9s	400ms	135ms

These values are tested with random positions, on a recent laptop, using Chrome 38. One half of markers is moving randomly and the other half is static. It is also fast enough for mobile devices.

If you prefer real world data, the 50k Leaflet.markercluster example is computed in 60ms (original).

Weight

You can specify the weight of each marker.

For example, you may want to add more importance to a marker representing an incident, than a marker representing a tweet.

Categories

You can specify a category for the markers. Then a small object representing the number of markers for each category is attached to the clusters. This way, you can create cluster icons adapted to their content.

Dynamic cluster size

The size of a cluster can be adjusted on the fly (Example)

Filtering

The markers can be filtered easily with no performance cost.

Usage

var pruneCluster = new PruneClusterForLeaflet();

...
var marker = new PruneCluster.Marker(latitude, longitude);
pruneCluster.RegisterMarker(marker);
...

leafletMap.addLayer(pruneCluster);

Update a position

marker.Move(lat, lng);

Deletions

// Remove all the markers
pruneCluster.RemoveMarkers();

// Remove a list of markers
pruneCluster.RemoveMarkers([markerA,markerB,...]);

Set the category

The category can be a number or a string, but in order to minimize the performance cost, it is recommended to use numbers between 0 and 7.

marker.category = 5;

Set the weight

marker.weight = 4;

Filtering

marker.filtered = true|false;

Set the clustering size

pruneCluster.Cluster.Size = 87;

Apply the changes

Must be called when ANY changes are made.

pruneCluster.ProcessView();

Add custom data to marker object

Each marker has a data object where you can specify your data.

marker.data.name = 'Roger';
marker.data.ID = '76ez';

Setting up a Leaflet icon or a Leaflet popup

You can attach to the markers an icon object and a popup content

marker.data.icon = L.icon(...);  // See http://leafletjs.com/reference.html#icon
marker.data.popup = 'Popup content';

Faster leaflet icons

If you have a lot of markers, you can create the icons and popups on the fly in order to improve their performance.

function createIcon(data, category) {
    return L.icon(...);
}

...

marker.data.icon = createIcon;

You can also override the PreapareLeafletMarker method. You can apply listeners to the markers here.

pruneCluster.PrepareLeafletMarker = function(leafletMarker, data) {
    leafletMarker.setIcon(/*... */); // See http://leafletjs.com/reference.html#icon
    //listeners can be applied to markers in this function
    leafletMarker.on('click', function(){
    //do click event logic here
    });
    // A popup can already be attached to the marker
    // bindPopup can override it, but it's faster to update the content instead
    if (leafletMarker.getPopup()) {
        leafletMarker.setPopupContent(data.name);
    } else {
        leafletMarker.bindPopup(data.name);
    }
};

Setting up a custom cluster icon

pruneCluster.BuildLeafletClusterIcon = function(cluster) {
    var population = cluster.population, // the number of markers inside the cluster
        stats = cluster.stats; // if you have categories on your markers

    // If you want list of markers inside the cluster
    // (you must enable the option using PruneCluster.Cluster.ENABLE_MARKERS_LIST = true)
    var markers = cluster.getClusterMarkers() 
        
    ...
    
    return icon; // L.Icon object (See http://leafletjs.com/reference.html#icon);
};

Redraw the icons

Marker icon redrawing with a flag:

marker.data.forceIconRedraw = true;

...

pruneCluster.ProcessView();

Redraw all the icons:

pruneCluster.RedrawIcons();

Acknowledgements

This library is developed in context of the BRIDGE project.

Licence

The source code of this library is licenced under the MIT License.