I'm trying to find a way to search for a business, such as "grocery stores" and display them on a google map around the users current location. This used to be pretty simple with the old URL style of launching the apple map location but I can't find out how to do it with the MKMapView. I understand that I'll need to use the MKAnnotations classes but my problem is with finding the data. I've tried plugging in the URL below to get the info from google but the size of the data seems way too large.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grocery&mrt=yp&sll=37.769561,-122.412844&z=14&output=kml
Is there an easy way to just set a property that tells the MKMapView to search for a keyword and display all matching business around my current location? Or does anybody know how to get this information from google?
The KML file that's returned by that search has a lot of information in it. MKMapView doesn't have a way to query Google, so you have a couple of choices:
Use the data that you get from that query with NSXMLParser, and only extract the things you're interested in (probably title, latitude, longitude). KML is just a version of XML.
Look through the Google docs to find a call that gives a more lightweight data format. You can change the format in your url to json, but the information in it is the same.
The file's only about 50KB though. In my experience, downloading and parsing a 50KB XML file takes about 5 seconds over 3G.
Edit: Just found this, thought you might be interested:
Many people transfer data to and from web services to the iPhone via JSON. This is a much better way than using XML. Parsing XML on the iPhone just plain sucks. It's overly complicated and super confusing. Currently the YouVersion app, Bible, uses JSON to transfer everything back and forth from the server and it all works great.
If you don't really have a choice, at least use JSON. Here is a great library for JSON that I currently use
http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/
From here: http://samsoff.es/post/iphone-plist-tutorial/
You can get JSON by changing the request string to this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=grocery&mrt=yp&sll=37.769561,-122.412844&z=14&output=json
Another Edit
Here's another JSON library called Touch JSON. I've used this one, and it's quite easy to implement.
https://github.com/acf/TouchJSON
Rather than using the maps?q= string, it is better to use the the official API here:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/
The JSON replies of the API work with the JSON Parser http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/ better (the other URL doesn't return compliant JSON, and isn't a standard API so may be more subject to change).
Related
I am writing an iphone application when you give a search text, it locate possible addresses.
I was thinking there maybe some Google API for this. I have seen several applications with this feature.
Can anyone provide some information on this?
If you've found the API you want (looks like you have), the basic idea is to use NSURLRequest, NSURLConnection, and NSMutableData to construct a url (ie. http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/output?parameters) and load the resulting data into your application.
From there, I would make use of a JSON parsing lib to convert the result string into an NSDictionary, so that you can use it easily in your app. This one is my favorite: http://code.google.com/p/json-framework/
good luck!
In my application i need to create and save data into an xml file on my webspace and then i want to parse that xml into my iphone app. The question here is this is being done by two different parties a sender and a receiver.
But i don;t know how to parse that xml file into my app when i don't have the excat url of that xml because there will be number of people who will be using this app so how i can allocate the xml a specific url and pass that url at receiver end.
Thanks,
As there is a lot to this question I can only give you a vague answer to keep it short. The type of communication I recommend using is NSURLConnection. That will allow you to get the contents of say an xml from a URL.
As far as identifying individual users there is a few ways all of them a fair bit of work. You could create a sign in where the user has a unique username or email. Store that in the database on your server and pass it as part of the url.
You could also sort of use push notification registration where your server is required to keep an iPhone unique identifier to push information to Apple. I don't know enough to push notification to give you much guidance in this but if you don't want the user to create an account I think this would be the way. You could also query the server for a unique ID and store it in NSUserDefaults.
I would recommend the user account creation though. Also have a look at NSXMLParser for your xml parsing.
Beyond this help ask a more specific question. There are also many other ways to do this, its just the way I do it.
I can help you with the parsing of the XML.
iOS (like mac) has a built in XML parser.
Still I would recommend you use an external library, there are several available out there.
In a recent project, I very successfully used TouchXML: http://github.com/schwa/TouchXML
Here is a very simple tutorial on how to use the TouchXML library to parse XML files:
http://foobarpig.com/iphone/parsing-xml-element-attributes-with-touchxml.html
(Very) basically my app is just a load of information collected from the internet - eg: someone can log into an admin panel on a website and update their app from there. The information gets put into a mysql database.
The way I thought about going about this was to use an RSS feed - it works for blog/twitter feeds, so I thought why not do it for the rest of the information that I want to get.
My question is, is this a suitable way to do it? Basically just make dynamic XML files (php scripts that output XML) and parse them on the iphone, or is there a better way to do it?
I'm not looking for a full blown tutorial, just maybe a few keywords that I can go off and look up myself - or a "XML is the best way... stick at that". :p
Thanks a lot.
I personally like JSON more than XML, since it creates less characters to transfer the same data = less bandwidth/transfer used and faster response.
You can use a JSON library from here or just stick with XML since you're familiar with it. I guess it's just a matter of personal preference.
MapKit doesn't natively support local search results, so I'm looking for a way to get a list of local pizzerias (or coffee shops, or a specific retailer) via some http api call.
The default google maps api requires javascript, so it's not clear to me how to integrate this into an iPhone app (without displaying a UIWebView).
I have found that a url in a format such as this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?output=json&q=pizza&near=37.3,-122&num=10
Does return a JSON-like list of results, but my usual friendly JSON parser, json-framework, barfs when it tries to parse this (even if I do clever-sounding things like leaving out the "while(1);" at the start of the reply). I'm also not sure how legitimate this URL is to use for this purpose.
I'm on the same quest. It seems that one option would be to perform the local search using Google's AJAX Search API, then plug that data into the mapkit.
That said, it's not entirely clear to me yet that this approach is in the clear vis a vis google's terms of service. Let's see here. Alright, changed my mind because of this. It's a post on google's own ajax api blog including video of a native iPhone app. Looks like this is the approved solution.
I'm pretty new to iPhone SDK and Cocoa development. I'd like to know how to call a web service which will take the lat and long values from my iPhone and feed them to a webservice so I can retrieve the City,State. I already have the phone location stuff squared away. I'm only looking for where I should pass this info to and how I can parse this data back into my app.
Essentially, I only want "City,State" to be visible in a label on one of my views.
The first time I tried this was with geonames.org and it put my returned lat/lng location in the middle of nowhere many many many miles from where I actually was. I tried the same lat/lng values with google maps api and it was in the right place. The only problem I've had is parsing the JSON data back into my app. The returned info seems to have multiple versions of the same info which I can't seem to understand how that works.
So once again. Just looking for a simple HTTP style string I can pass somewhere with my lat/lng values and it returns "City,State". If the example you mention involves parsing data. Please refer to an example I can dissect - I'm a noob.
Oh and one last thing, I know this was made possibly easier with the iPhone 3.0 SDK but I'm currently building this project on 2.2.1 - and for more than enough reason HAVE to do it this way until the rest of the app is ported to 3.0.
Look at the replies here and here