Command to toggle webmap overlays?

Hi, I have a mapping application where I am plotting a rectangle on a webmap. My script calls

webMapObj = webmap('World Imagery');

and brings up the appropriate map. I can click the map options to toggle the overlay layers as in this link:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/map/add-an-overlay-layer-to-the-map.html

I like the option for the "World Boundaries (Light Text)". I would like to be able to toggle this option from my script so that it turns on automatically without having to touch the checkbox in the GUI. However, I cannot find the commands for this. What commands can I type in the Command Window and/or my script to toggle on/off the "World Boundaries"?

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Shubham]

Hi Jennifer,

It seems you are looking to toggle webmap overlays in MATLAB programmatically. While MATLAB's webmap function does not directly support toggling overlays like "World Boundaries (Light Text)" from a script, you can achieve similar functionality with these workarounds:

• Add custom overlays to a webmap using functions like wmline, wmpolygon, or wmoverlay.

% Open web map
webMapObj = webmap('World Imagery');

% Example coordinates for a rectangular boundary
lat = [40, 40, 41, 41, 40];  % Example latitudes
lon = [-75, -74, -74, -75, -75];  % Example longitudes

% Plot the boundary as a polygon
wmpolygon(lat, lon, 'FaceColor', 'none', 'EdgeColor', 'blue', 'LineWidth', 2);

• If you have specific boundary data in shapefiles or GeoJSON, load them and overlay them:

% Load shapefile
S = shaperead('world_boundaries.shp'); % Replace with your shapefile

% Overlay each boundary
for k = 1:length(S)
    wmpolygon(S(k).Lat, S(k).Lon, 'FaceColor', 'none', 'EdgeColor', 'black');
end

• Consider creating a custom basemap with overlays baked using addCustomBasemap if you frequently use specific overlays

For more details on webmap, refer to the following documentation link:

https://mathworks.com/help/releases/R2022b/map/ref/webmap.html

Hope this helps.