I need to add functionality to an APEX Application which would support drawing capabilities with mouse clicks. Any experiences or thoughts in these areas would be greatly appreciated.
The basic workflow would be a user identifying points on top of a photo with mouse clicks, after which a small dot should appear. Of course, two points define a line, and two lines form angles. Also, lengths of lines could be compared to calculate ratios between the two lines if certain ratios were useful. Fortunately, all points, lines, angles, and ratios can be predefined with metadata.
The workflow for the user would be creating a point with a mouse click, at which point a modal window would popup and ask them to name that point from a select list which pulls from the predefined "point" or node metadata. And when the user creates a second point with mouse click, then the drawing functionality should check the "line" metadata to see if there is a predefined lines between those two points, and if there is then it should automatically draw it. For example, in the resulting drawing below, one of the points would be tagged as "Eye" and the second as "Shoulder" by the user clicking the mouse on each, and then after the second point is created then the line between the two user-defined points should automatically be drawn, because it was predefined this line in my metadata. Subsequently, if two lines were created by the user on given photo, then any predefined angles or ratios in the metadata should be calculated and displayed on top of the photo. In the end, all of the points, lines, angles, and ratios should be saved to the database.
I have put quick APEX application which covers most of the metadata setup etc., but I have no idea how to incorporate the most important page which would display a photo and support drawing capability on top of it. It's not as urgent of a requirement, but I'm also not sure how to trigger an APEX modal window popup, and then have the data which I enter into that window tie to the point drawn by the user.
One thought was to use the R-library named RGL which can graphically create xyz coordinates although I only need 2D xy, and it can also draw vectors. The though would be to use this in conjunction with the Oracle R plugin, but this is all such new territory for me that I'm not sure if that is even feasible to work in conjunction with APEX.
Once again any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.