Lattice Grid 1.73: shapes in a column, and maps that ask the engine

A table of sites, routes or regions never had anywhere to put the shape itself. A postcode area was a code, a delivery zone was a name, and finding “what falls inside this box” meant pulling every row into the browser and testing each one by hand. This release gives a column somewhere to put the shape, and gives the engine underneath the grid the job of answering with it.

A column can hold a shape

Import the geometry module and a column reads type: 'geometry'. Give it a point, a line or a polygon, in WKT, WKB or GeoJSON, and the cell reads back as a plain sentence: “Point 51.5074°N 0.1278°W”, “Polygon, 14 vertices, 2.31 km²”. Sort it and it orders by location. Filter it and four new operators are on offer alongside the ones every column already has: within a box, within a polygon, intersecting another shape, or within a distance of a point.

grid.filters.set({ col: 'site', op: 'withinBbox', value: [-4, 50, 2, 56] });

GeoParquet, read straight into DuckDB in the browser

Point the DuckDB adapter at a GeoParquet file with spatial: true and every one of those four filters runs inside DuckDB rather than in the browser. A box drawn on a map, a polygon traced around a territory, a radius around a point: DuckDB’s own spatial extension answers it, over a file that never leaves your bucket and a browser that never has to load more than the page in front of the reader.

A choropleth, filled straight from the column

Give a choropleth chart a geometry column and it draws each row’s own boundary, filled by a measure, with no separate map file to load and join by code. A point on the same column draws as a marker, so one dataset can mix named sites and shaded territories on the one map.

The map’s own pan and zoom, now a filter

Turn on viewportFilter and panning or zooming a map writes one condition back onto the grid it reads from: whatever is on screen is what the grid, and every other chart or tile reading the same grid, now shows. Set a matching filter from somewhere else, a saved view, a sibling panel, and the map pans to match it instead of fighting it.

Maps and tiles that ask the engine, not the page

A map or a KPI tile beside a grid holding one page of a much larger relation used to describe that page: the total in view, not the true total. Both now ask the engine for the whole matching set, over any pushdown source, and say so. A sum tile reads engine; a map’s own reading reports how many rows it drew against how many actually matched. Panning a live map over ten thousand sites, or narrowing a tile over a hundred-thousand-row Parquet file, now answers with the real figure rather than the fraction that happened to have loaded.

See it running

A value filled straight into each country’s own boundary, panning a map to narrow the grid beside it, and a spatial filter pushed into DuckDB from a GeoParquet file are all running on this site. The geospatial guide covers the column type, the operators and the map options in full.

The full list is in the changelog.