Today's guest post is courtesy of Jamey Baxter who is a Computer Programs Analyst II/SharePoint Developer with the Office of Information Technology at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Jamey read my post on mapping a list with latitude and longitude and adding the name to the popup. He took the method and implemented it on a unique project I thought you would like to hear about it.
Along the way, Jamey updated the solution to work for the needs of the Commision. For example, if you are not using a Contacts list, remove the If statement that checks for the WorkAddress field. Also, you can re-enable paging, which I had turned off in my example.
-Tom
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This is an example of Google Map integration that we are starting to implement on our intranet at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The first site we are using this with is our Imperiled Species Management – Manatee Group which is a part of our Habitat and Species Conservation division. The overall implementation will eventually be deployed to any division that requests it that has lat/long coordinates associated with their projects. It quickly lets them view the locations of projects in relation to each other. It has also already allowed them to catch some incorrect lat/longs.
The page starts out with no selection, which makes the page load extremely fast since there are no markers or data to load into the dataview. This is accomplished by adding the dropdown as a dataview control filter which uses the counties as the filter. I input these into the dropdown manually due to their being a finite amount of counties and the original list also uses a static dropdown.
Once you select a county from the dropdown it places the markers on the map, recenters the map, sets the bounds, and builds the popup bubbles. Both the items in the dataview and the bubbles provide links to the original list item. Specific map site links are created by a separate workflow that builds a GoogleMaps hyperlink using the lat/long data and places it in the GMAP column. Also to prevent errors I placed an IF statement to filter out the items that did not have lat/longs from attempting to be placed on the map.
Zoom into Manatees Select
Getting this working will give us a very valuable and powerful tool that we can deploy for various SharePoint lists and will benefit our users greatly.