Create custom markers with R for your webmap

When it comes to webmapping there are thousands of possible markers you can choose from but when it comes to markers depending on the data, which is inside the shapefile, possibilities are more limited. In leaflet you can define different icons according to the attributes of your data by defining the icon url in an attribute. Let me show you, how to use the data in each feature to create a custom icon like a piechart marker using R.

For this you will need R installed. Especially if you’re new to R I highly recommend RStudio. It has a great GUI and it’s platform independent.

Getting data into R

To enable R reading shapefiles we will need to load additional libraries into R. Therefore we are using the gdal bindings to R:

setwd("~/r_pie")# set the working directory with your files inside:
install.packages("sp") #will be needed to load rgdal
library("sp")
install.packages("rgdal") #here's rgdal
library("rgdal") #enable it for your workflow

Now let’s have look at the Shapefile itself which will be exported:

ogrListLayers("places.shp")
shape<-readOGR("places.shp", layer="places") #will load the shapefile to your dataset.
data<-shape@data
view(data)

Create piecharts and store everything

As we are now having the data stored in an extra variable we can do “crazy stuff” and having a simple loop over the data and create a piechart for every entry according to the variables in columns 9 to 13:

for (i in 1:dim(data)[1]){ #will use every line of the attribute table
  svg(paste(,"/plots",i,".svg", sep = ""), bg="transparent") #creates an svg file were we will "print into"
  pie(t(data[i,9:13]), init.angle = 90, col=c("red","blue","yellow", "green", "grey"), labels=NA) #this will create the pie chart itself with five collors as we have five columns
  dev.off()
}

What we need to do now? Change the attribute table an add a new column with the pathes we just used to store the svgs.

for (i in 1:dim(data)[1]){
  shape$icon_exp[i] <- paste(getwd(),"/plots",i,".svg", sep = "") #will populate a new attribute with the paths
}
writeOGR(shape, "places", driver="ESRI Shapefile", layer="places") 

Now load it into QGIS and export it via QGIS2leaf… The icons are a bit small, but you can easily change this by looking at the code in line 47:

iconSize:     [24, 24],
iconAnchor:   [12, 12]
popupAnchor:  [0, -14] 

Increase values as you like and it could look like this: