WFS-T with OpenLayers

edit: I no longer use WFS or Geoserver in production and recommend that you read my article in regards to editing dynamic vector tile layers with OpenLayers.

I am currently using GeoServer 2.8. The data store being a PostGIS 2.1 database.

For my test service I use a very simple table with an ID and geometry only. The geometry is defined as geometry, no type nor projection. It is important that the geometry field is called geometry. Otherwise inserts may create records with empty geometry fields. A constraint must be set on the ID or GeoServer will not be able to insert records into the table.

At the core of the OL javascript snippets is the ol.format.WFS.writeTransaction function which takes 4 input parameter. The first 3 parameter define whether the data should be inserted, updated, or deleted from the data source. The 4th parameter takes the form of ol.format.GML and passes on information about the feature type, namespace, and projection of the data.

The writeTransaction node must be serialised with an XMLSerializer to be used in a WFS-T post.

The three use cases (insert/update/delete) and the AJAX call are shown in the following code snippet.

Inserts are called from the drawend event of the OL interaction. The .clear() function on the WFS source reloads the source after each transaction. This ensure that feature IDs are correct for new features and that deleted features are removed from the view.

The ID of a modified feature is stored and the update transaction is posted once the feature is unselected. In order to successfully post an update transaction the boundedBy property must be stripped from the feature properties. A clone of the feature is used to achieve this.