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)

The poll


The approach we have taken throughout this book is to extend the Microsoft.Maps API by means of modules. This project is not an exception. So far, our project folder holds the index.html file and the learningTheme folder. Let's add a poll directory, inside which we create the poll.js and poll.css files.

Let's start with our familiar module skeleton inside poll.js, as shown in the following code snippet:

(function() {
  var lbm = window.lbm || {};

  lbm.Poll = function(map, $) {
    this._map = map;
    this.$ = $;
  };

  Microsoft.Maps.moduleLoaded('lbm.Poll');
})();

The Poll module is attached to the lbm namespace so that the global scope does not get cluttered. Its constructor accepts an instance of the map and a jQuery object as its arguments.

Now it's time to pause for a minute and think how we want to develop the user interface. The requirements state that we need to show the results for four elections; so probably a list with four buttons labeled with each elections year could...