Virtual Earth API 6.2 with SharePoint

Virtual Earth API Update

As I promised at my SharePoint Saturday Presentation in Boston, I’ve updated my previous example integrating SharePoint with the Virtual Earth SDK. The original example was based on the SharePoint Designer Team Blog post, How to Integrate Virtual Earth Maps with a SharePoint List, from almost 2 years ago.

Greg Chan’s original post is still great, and I recommend you give a read to see how he did the magic. However, there is at least one update needed to make his post work with the latest version of the Virtual Earth API. The FindLocation method in the API appears to have been replaced with a method named just Find. And the callback function appears to take a lot more arguments than he used.

Stylesheet Download

Use this code to replace the stylesheet from the SharePoint Designer Team Blog post. Right click save, MyLiveMaps.xsl

Reference

Demo

Figure 1 View Live Custom Contacts List Display Form

5 Comments
  1. Hi Tom.

    Trying to intergrate this with the Core Search results webpart in MOSS so that push pins are added for all search results by modifying the XSLT. However i always get a blank DIV. I am looking to create a lightweight standalone solution without using Federated Search, extra ASP.net pages and RSS feeds.

    Any ideas?

    Thanks, hope this message finds you well.

    James Bruiners

  2. Hi James, The Core Search results work sounds interesting and useful. Will you let me know if you get it working? Do you have access to http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2 from your search page? I suggest testing the code from the XSL with a plain ASPX page in a document library to verify.
    Thanks for reading and commenting! -Tom

  3. Tell me more on this topic badly interested

  4. Hi Tom,

    I have created XSLT that will make use of the 6.2 VE from a plain aspx page and then emulated that on the Core Search results webpart in MOSS, unfortunately the performance is so bad that there was no point, however I am looking at way of internally indexing the XSLT to make this quicker.

    Basically the problem is with embedded JavaScript recursively accessing the ashx service, slows everything down to a stand still, have to reset the iis app for the site ;(…

    But I will update you if something gives…

    Thanks

    James

  5. James,
    Tha’s really cool that you have Core Search results working. Remove the script line from the XSLT and move to somewhere that it only get’s called once to improve performance. I demonstrate this with the Google script and the content editor web part in another post.
    Thanks for the comment,
    Tom
    Reference:
    Followup to SharePoint Contacts List on a Map from Google

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