The Map Tiles Tool provides various utilities for creating and managing map tiles.

The map tiles technology involves cutting map data into tiles of various formats and storage types. Pre-generated tiles can significantly improve the access efficiency of online maps. SuperMap offers two major tile types: raster tiles and vector tiles.

Raster tile is a relatively traditional mode. Essentially, it involves cutting the map into uniformly sized map images according to different scale levels and specific tiling rules. Raster tiles are typically image files in formats such as PNG, JPG, JPG_PNG, PNG8, or WEBP.

Vector tile involves generating vector tiles (.mvt) from vector maps that comply with the MapBox MVT specification. The tile data contains the geometric shapes and attributes of features, while the feature styling is described by a MapBox standard style file (style.json). Compared to raster tiles, vector tiles offer advantages such as smooth zooming, style modification, and relatively smaller data size, better meeting the needs of flexible and diverse web map applications.

For map tiles, SuperMap provides three storage formats: original, compact, and MongoDB.

• Original: Tile files are stored on disk as separate picture files (for raster tiles) or .mvt files (for vector tiles). The data is not compressed and can be read directly.
• Compact: The original tile files are compressed and encrypted using specific mechanisms. Structurally, a set of files replaces the original tile mechanism based on image formats (for raster tiles) or .mvt format (for vector tiles).
• MongoDB: The generated tiles are stored in a distributed format within a database on the server. Additionally, MongoDB supports storing multi-version caches.

The Map Tiles Tool provides the capability for multi-process map tile generation. Based on factors such as the map's scale and geographic range, the tiling task is first split into multiple subtasks. When executing multi-process map tile generation, multiple processes can acquire independent, non-overlapping tiling tasks, thereby enabling parallel tiling across processes. This method fully utilizes the machine's hardware resources, greatly improving the efficiency of map tile generation.

Furthermore, the Map Tiles Tool also offers map tile inspection capabilities. It can check for common tile issues such as blank tiles or white lines in image map tiles, and supports multi-process inspection. The check results also include the specific tiling subtask where problematic tiles are located. Subsequently, these problematic tiling tasks can be re-executed using the Multi-process Map Tile Generation tool, effectively performing tile patching.

Note:

• For multi-process map tile generation, it is required that all data sources within the map's workspace be opened as read-only. Otherwise, execution may fail.
• The Check Map Tiles in Multiple Processes tool only supports inspecting map tiles in the compact and MongoDB storage formats.