Newbie: Basics

[banterer]

Hello, I have not gotten my copy of 8.5 advanced yet but I want to start asking questions already.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a programmer. I am an ex-electrical engineer that was never too crazy about coding because I was not too fond of the debugging tools. However, I do still consider myself pretty sharp and can pick things up if I am interested and if they are available in a well documented form.

I have for many years wanted a simple way of being able to answer a question that comes up time and time again from our customers: Can you tell me if you have a dealer close to me?

I would like to be able to plug in their zip code and have dalers pop up starting with the closest one first - even if it is in a different state.

• Is this something that should be easy to do?
• Can I make something like this available to customers on our website?
• Will it entail much programming or is zip code data/distance information available from the government?
• Even if it is doable, is it too difficult a task for a beginner to tackle?

Thanks,

Jorge

[aldipalo]

I know it can be done in FM, not sure about IWP, but, I would think it could.

Can you do it yourself if a question only you can answer. The data is available, for free, online and will give you City, State, Zip, Longitude and Latitude. You can also find examples within this forum.

How long it will take you is obviously an unknown.

HTH

[banterer]

Thanks HTH,

What is IWP?

Under what kind of heading might I find the samples? I imagine this type of thing is categorized but my searches for "distance by zip" and similar queries - yielded nothing.

Jorge

[comment]

You could search for 'latitude' for example, but I don't think you will find an answer to your problem. The difficulty, in a nutshell, is that in order to calculate the distance between two points, you need the coordinates of BOTH points. That makes proximity searches rather problematic - see also here.

I should add that Brian Dunning offers a commercial product that claims to do exactly that, but I don't know how it works or how well it performs.