\nLast week at the SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart I showed an example of using SQL Server 2008 spatial data types with Virtual Earth. I showed a single coding style. There really is a plethora of coding styles to using these together, and I'd like to describe some of the most common ones. I'd like to do this without much code for now, because an end-to-end description sometimes results in the graphic aspects (which other controls to use, how to build Ajax web pages, etc) seem to get in the way.\n<\/p>\n
\nI'm not even going to mention using Virtual Earth to serve tiles directly, but only the Virtual Earth web control. Start with the Virtual Earth Interactive SDK for coding information.\n<\/p>\n
\nIn general, what we're after is:
\n Page contains Virtual Earth control
\n Page makes a request to a Web Service for data (usually Ajax)
\n Web Service get and processes data from database, returns data
\n Page uses Virtual Earth calls to present the data\n<\/p>\n
\nThe first two are straightforward, although the Virtual Earth control is available only online via a URL. This makes testing when you don't have internet access virtually impossible. The Ajax request (that is, call a URL with an XML payload using a browser-specific mechanism, wait asynchronously for the response) normally doesn't use SOAP-based Web Services, because you'd have to add and remove the SOAP headers. It's usually XML-in, XML-out, sans SOAP headers.\n<\/p>\n
\nThe Virtual Earth calls depend on what version of Virtual Earth control you're using. I'll show this using version 6.
\n1. You can render using shapes directly
\n2. You can import GEORSS into a shape layer
\n3. You can import KML into a shape layer\n<\/p>\n
\nVirtual Earth supports visualizing shapes directly (#1 above) by using:
\n1. AddPushpin – to visualize a point or the centroid of a polygon
\n2. AddPolyline – that's Linestring in SQL Server 2008
\n3. AddPolygon – for polygons\n<\/p>\n
\nFor shape layers (#2 and #3 above), the code looks something like this:\n<\/p>\n
\nvar l = new VEShapeLayer();
\nvar veLayerSpec = new VEShapeSourceSpecification(type, local.xml, l);\n<\/p>\n
\nmap.ImportShapeLayerData(veLayerSpec, onFeedLoad);\n<\/p>\n
\nThe "type" in the VEShapeSourceSpecification constructor can either be GEORSS or ImportXML (that's KML). You can also have a Live Search Maps Collection but likely that one won't come from SQL Server. Bear in mind that the VEShapeSourceSpecification constructor needs a *local* XML file URL. If you don't want to use a local XML file, you can build an ASP.NET HTTPHandler that uses redirection to pretend a remote XML file is local (see Mike McDougall's article and code to accomplish this).\n<\/p>\n
\nOne last twist that I've seen is that you can build your Javascript code directly in each page OR make the Web Service program reformat your data into Javascript calls directly. Once you're back at the page (the Web Service passes back a string of Javascript) you simply call Javascript's "eval" function. This makes the web page client-side code easy, but the Web Service code lots more complex, as you're generating code, not points, lines, and polygons.\n<\/p>\n
\nWeb Service choices follow next….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last week at the SQL Server 2008 Jumpstart I showed an example of using SQL Server 2008 spatial data types with Virtual Earth. I showed a single coding style. There really is a plethora of coding styles to using these together, and I'd like to describe some of the most common ones. I'd like to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sql-server-2008","category-sql-server-spatial"],"yoast_head":"\n