Posted by david on 25. June 2009 19:08
restarting a project is hard! muddling through where I was - where I need to go ... especially not easy with my stream of conciousness blog style. So, Going Forward, I'll really really try to be succinct.
Where I was - I've had two working map pages, loading up from RSS feeds & from a DB. When I was last working on the project I had put aside the mapping & was working on manipulating the data - aiming at a flexible tag system that connected to a db of "Places of Interest". My first data set is the King County Parks, for which I have 54 attributes.
All I wanted was a list of OffLeash parks! Now I'll have parks with offleash areas, lacrosse fields, and handicap accessible restrooms. Cool.
Where I am - I've got a db & the data from the february work. Alot of the records had not been geocoded yet. My first task was to get them geocoded so I could start loading up the maps again.
There are a few solutions floating around out there for batch geocoding from SQL Server. My server is on shared hosting that does not give me CLR abilities - so I was hosed for that path.
I already had a web service attached to MapPoint to get geocodes one at a time. So, yesterday, I started exploring how to iterate through grid, calling the service.
Which led me back into the gridview & updatepanel messes. I got the iteration through the grid just fine, in fact I was surprised to find the whole list had been geocoded, save 20 or so with bad addresses. However, I got stuck trying to figure out how to have a UpdateProgress panel indicate what record was being processed, dynamically. I beat my head against that wall for a few hours before I passed out from the pain. I will get back to it.
For now, I've got a healthy list of geocoded parks. I've now got to get the tag system displaying & available for filtering down the list.
Also, I am absolutely committed to using a ObjectDataSource for the maps - so I will continue working on the data only - no maps - until I can make those gridviews dance. Dance, I said! Bang! Bang!