CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Bit of a longshot, as I've asked on the Google Maps forums already with no joy, but is it at all possible to integrate Google Maps in to CiviCRM to create and display delivery routes?

One of the activities the organisation I work with does is leaflet delivery - it's a time-consuming task, trying to organise routes, plotting them out, and getting maps and literature to deliverers, so it would really help if there was a tool that could allow us to drop in a list of streets or certain addresses that could then be used by Google Maps to plot a line highlighting the streets on each route - which could then be assigned to a supporter for them to deliver.

I know that Google Maps can obviously find a street or a particular address and plot it on a map and I know that it can also plot a line following a particular street, so the next logical line of thought is that surely it's possible for it to do both?

Hi,

That's a very complex problem (NP-hard). Not aware of a solution integrated with google map. (search "Travelling salesman problem", you might find something). Might be that you can download the list of addresses from civi, upload there somewhere and let the service draw the map.

X+

hi,

nice tool, thanks to point it out.

@jsp_1983: seems you have a solution. you might be able to integrate it into Civi directly too

X+

How about something like http://gebweb.net/optimap/? Their code is available at http://code.google.com/p/google-maps-tsp-solver/. This would be useful for thing like delivering lawn signs too.

To an extent, yes, it does some of what I want it to do, however it only calculates fastest routes. Where this causes problems is that roads will be highlighted merely because they offer access to a particular street on a delivery route, even if they aren't actually part of that delivery route, which might cause some confusion with deliverers (particularly if it's a route that's new to them), especially if there are 'trickier' routes where some parts of an area boundary aren't entirely obvious and dip and out of a street at various points.

It does look promising, though, so I get the feeling that it's a feasible tool to put together at some point- just unfortunately, I'm not a coder :/

Could you be a sponsor to make it happen ?

How would it likely cost to sponsor development of functionality similar to that found on the Optimap demo?