Changing the GeoMap basemap after MapQuest discontinue the direct tile access

[Former Member]

I had a call from a customer today about the Geo Maps within their Design Studio dashboard. They use the standard GeoMap component which, by default, uses the MapQuest basemap (http://otile1.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/map/{LOD}/{X}/{Y}.png).

When running the dashboard, they received the following messages in the map rendering (note this is a test map/dashboard and not the actual productive version).

Looking at the MapQuest communication, they discontinued the direct tile access to MapQuest legacy maps after 11^th July 2016 and you need to sign up for an account (and developer key) on their developer network.

http://devblog.mapquest.com/2016/06/15/modernization-of-mapquest-results-in-changes-to-open-tile-acc...

In order to quickly get the maps working again and not have to sign up for an account and worry about API/developer keys I used some of the other base maps available. Thanks to Mike Howles for his guidance in this previous SCN post.

The new/alternative base map URLs can be entered into the GeoMap’s Basemap URL property.

The ones I quickly tried (after converting the parameter to be Design Studio friendly) were as below, along with the screenshots of the tests I did.Obviously the maps look different to the MapQuest one so that needs to be taken into consideration. The custom GeoJSONs worked perfectly again after choosing the new basemaps.

OpenStreetMap

http://tile.openstreetmap.org/{LOD}/{X}/{Y}.png

Stamen Map

http://tile.stamen.com/toner/{LOD}/{X}/{Y}.png

ESRI

http://server.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/World_Topo_Map/MapServer/tile/{LOD}/{Y}/{X}.png

For the customer's scenarios they have two map layers  - one for the group of locations, where the boundary of the region is coloured and then the coloured polygons within that boundary.