Book Image

Learning Bing Maps API

By : Artan Sinani
Book Image

Learning Bing Maps API

By: Artan Sinani

Overview of this book

Provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines, Bing Maps is a web mapping service powered by the Bing Maps for Enterprise framework. The need for geospatial data has increased dramatically in the last few years. Adding a mapping context to any location-based data is becoming more and more common, and businesses are embracing it to improve their user experience with new data richness. Comprising of simple, follow-along examples, Learning Bing Maps API will show you how to use the many features of Bing Maps, from dropping a simple map on a web page, to fetching geospatial data from the Microsoft servers. Through the course of this book you will build a solid foundation for creating your own geo-applications.Following the hands-on recipes of this book, you will build a different web app in each chapter as you communicate with different APIs provided by Bing Maps. You will build your own library of JavaScript modules that talk to the Microsoft Maps API.You will create a custom theme for the map, with your own controls. Taking advantage of the global reach of Bing Maps, you will learn how to build a route scheduler for a delivery company in Madrid, Spain, and then you will discover how to create jobs on the Bing Maps servers for geocoding addresses in California, USA. By the end of the book you will have learned everything you need to know to embed a map on a web page, with your own geo-data, or data obtained by the Bing Map Services.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 6. Diving into Spatial Data Services

We have a pretty good idea now of how the APIs to the Bing Maps data work. They are normally URL templates we can query for a single point of data, like a coordinate, or entire sets, as we did with the spatial geocoding. In Chapter 2, Diving into Bing Maps AJAX Control Version 7, we went to Paris, and when we clicked on the map, the Bing Maps gave us the address of that location.

Now we will go back to the United States and have a look at the Geodata API; it is at the moment in preview mode, which makes it interesting in giving us an insight to the direction of where the Bing Maps are headed.

The Geodata API produces a set of polygons that constitute the boundaries of a geographic area, such as different levels of postcodes, province, or state.

In this chapter, we will build a small web app that shows the postcode of the point where the user clicks on a map. The main structure of the application is the same as in the previous chapters, starting with...