Virtual Earth & MapPoint Web Services

Milan561738

Hi

Is there a way to combine Virtual Earth Map Control and data uploaded to MapPoint Web Services If anybody has any example it would be great.

Thanks in advance

Milan

SoulSolutions

It is absolutly possible but a little more work then you would expect.
You need to impliment some server side code to retrieve your data from the MWS using your secure login details and then pass the data to your client browsers for rendering in VE.

There are a number of different strategies.

1) If you have a really trival set of points (<300), i suspect you don't. You could do a single call to retrieve all of them, probably cache that in memory for performance and output it as a geoRSS feed. See the iSDK on how to easily add this as a layer.

http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk/

2) If you have millions of points. Use MWS spatial queries to only retrieve the data in the current view of the map, I would then apply clustering server side to avoid having overlapping or more then 200 points, others simply would not show the data unless at the given zoom level there is less then 200 points. You retern this data as aprt of an ajax query whenever the user moves the map.

I don't have a MWS example but this article shows a possible architecture using an xml file as the data source, you would simply replace this with the MWS access logic.

http://www.soulsolutions.com.au/Articles/ClusteringVirtualEarthrev2/tabid/103/Default.aspx

If this is of great interest to you or other maybe we should make a working example of this, the benifit of storing your data in MWS is the ability to run some interesting spatial queries we can't do well in SQL2005 as well as compatibility with Map point to support other system.

John.