Virtual Earth and FM WV

[rellis32]

For the last few days I've been working on having FM update a webpage that displays MS Virtual Earth map with data for scheduled jobs and unscheduled jobs. The primary purpose of this is so if an installer is on his way home he can look at the map on the web and maybe pick up a repair job or something on his way home. What I have done is

1) Wrote up the VE webpage. It's not pretty, but it does have the map.

2) Did a whole lot of reading on GeoRSS and it's integration with VE.

3) Figured out how to make the xslt to format the xml exported from filemaker into the GeoRSS xml file that VE needs to display the data on the map on layers.

4) Scripted an FTP upload of the exported xml files to the server (thanks to Matt for the great video on this at Filemaker Magazine!)

This is working great, while it's not "live" data, it can be updated with the push of a button! I can't quite seem to convince the owner of the company that FMSA is worth the expense :

What I would like to do now, is actually use this as a tool in the scheduling database. We use MapPoint to plot out the scheduled, unscheduled jobs, but I would like to be able to do the within FM. Meaning have a webviewer that would zoom in on the current record on the map, so I could easily see what jobs are in the same area. I can do this with google map, local.live etc. by using the url, but obviously those sites won't have all the data displayed from the other jobs. Does anyone know if this is possible on a server other than the main google, ms, servers? Sending the info as a url to the map? If not, does anyone have any idea's as to how I might accomplish this?

Thanks for any input!

Bob

[Wim Decorte]

We use MapPoint to plot out the scheduled, unscheduled jobs, but I would like to be able to do the within FM

You can use MapPoint from inside FM through the use of VBscript, or create a custom VB app that uses the MapPoint ActiveX controls so you can even fully customize the UI for the user.

You'll have a lot more power talking to MapPoint than going through VE.

[rellis32]

that's very interesting. Unfortunetly I wouldn't even know where to begin to do something like this. Off to google I go!

Bob