Leaflet: Fit polyline in view

Mark NeedhamJanuary 2nd, 2018Last Updated: January 2nd, 2018

0 59 2 minutes read

I’ve been playing with the Leaflet.js library over the Christmas holidays to visualise running routes drawn onto the map using a Polyline and I wanted to zoom the map the right amount to see all the points.

Pre requisites

We have the following HTML to define the div that will contain the map.

<div id="container">
	<div id="map" style="width: 100%; height: 100%">
	</div>
</div>

We also need to import the following Javascript and CSS files:

<script src="http://cdn.leafletjs.com/leaflet-0.7/leaflet.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="https://rawgit.com/jieter/Leaflet.encoded/master/Polyline.encoded.js"></script>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cdn.leafletjs.com/leaflet-0.7/leaflet.css"/>
 
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/leaflet.draw/0.4.2/leaflet.draw.css"/>
  <script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/leaflet.draw/0.4.2/leaflet.draw.js"></script>

Polyline representing part of a route

The following code creates a polyline for a Strava segment that I often run.

var map = L.map('map');
L.tileLayer('http://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {maxZoom: 18,}).addTo(map);
 
var rawPoints = [
  { "latitude": 51.357874010145395, "longitude": -0.198045110923591 },
  { "latitude": 51.3573858289394, "longitude": -0.19787754933584795 },
  { "latitude": 51.35632791810057, "longitude": -0.19750254941422557 },
  { "latitude": 51.35553240304241, "longitude": -0.197232163894512 },
  { "latitude": 51.35496267279901, "longitude": -0.1970247338143316 },
  { "latitude": 51.35388700570004, "longitude": -0.19666483094752069 },
  { "latitude": 51.3533898352570, "longitude": -0.1964976504847828 },
  { "latitude": 51.35358452733139, "longitude": -0.19512563906602554 },
  { "latitude": 51.354762877995036, "longitude": -0.1945622934585907 },
  { "latitude": 51.355610110109986, "longitude": -0.19468697186046677 },
  { "latitude": 51.35680377680643, "longitude": -0.19395063336295112 },
  { "latitude": 51.356861596801075, "longitude": -0.1936180154828497 },
  { "latitude": 51.358487396611125, "longitude": -0.19349660642888197 }
];
 
var coordinates = rawPoints.map(rawPoint => new L.LatLng(rawPoint["latitude"], rawPoint["longitude"]))
 
let polyline = L.polyline(
    coordinates,
    {
        color: 'blue',
        weight: 3,
        opacity: .7,
        lineJoin: 'round'
    }
);
 
polyline.addTo(map);

I wanted to centre the map around the polyline and initially wrote the following code to do this:

let lats = rawPoints.map(c => c.latitude).reduce((previous, current) => current += previous, 0.0);
let longs = rawPoints.map(c => c.longitude).reduce((previous, current) => current += previous, 0.0);
 
const position = [lats / rawPoints.length, longs / rawPoints.length];
map.setView(position, 17);

This works fine but the zoom factor was wrong when I drew longer polylines so I needed a better solution.

I should have RTFM because there’s a much simpler way to do this. I actually found the explanation in a GitHub issue from 2011! We can replace the previous snippet with this single line of code: