Openlayers 3 geojson vs vector source

Question

I have just started using OL3 in my application and I see that there is (at least) two ways of drawing features on the map; ol.source.Vector and ol.source.geoJSON.

Except for syntax, what are the advantages/disadvantages using one over the other? What about performance? As far as I can tell, I can draw both lines and points with both, and that is really all I need.

My data is not in geoJSON format, so I would have to convert the data anyway.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You will use an ol.source.GeoJSON if the data you want to display is encoded in GeoJSON. There are also vector sources for other formats, ol.source.KML for example.

If you use a specific format for your vectors or manually create vector features using new ol.Feature(...) then use the base class, namely ol.source.Vector . This is the most flexible, and the one one will use in most cases IMO. Instances of that class expose methods like addFeatures , addFeature , removeFeature , clear that you can use to add/remove vector features to/from the vector source. It also exposes methods to "query" the source. Check out the docs!