CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I'm trying to do some custom Google Map applications along with CiviCRM, and am running into some roadblocks and was wondering if anyone could help, or point me in the right place.

I am trying to pull additional information from custom fields into $location from CiviCRM, and then utilize it to vary the images displayed by Google Maps for the markers on the map. My vision is to come up with ways to do up to 3 or 4 dimensions of variance on a marker, (Color/Size/Flag Icon) depending on the value of the fields.

I really have 2 questions, First in order to append a few fields into $location, where is the actual SQL call to pull the data into location that Map uses?

Second, conceptually, where's the logical place to put code that will utilize the data? Do I want to put it in Google.tpl and generate the name of the image to be used on the fly there? That seems the simplest way to do it, but that seems like a lot of "code" to put into Smarty.

Say I've got custom fields "Color_of_Car", "Make_of_Car", "Age_of_Car".

When Color_of_Car = 'Green', Make_of_Car = 'Mazda' and Age_of_Car ='3' Google Maps is to append the value of those fields and display the image named "GreenMazda3.png" 

GreenMazda3.png is a premade Green Icon of size "3", with an M in the flag representing a 3 year old Green Mazda on the map.

Assume I have permutated hundreds of combinations of colors, flags and sizes in my image directory to get a multitude of options.

Any help pointing the way, even to the right forum to post, would be much appreciated.

I understand the simplicity of keeping hard programming out of Google.tpl, but it seems to be that adding an additional foreach into Map.php might have some performance issues, especially when dealing with large data sets.

So I'm going to keep any code into Google.tpl limited to Javascript and build the image file names there, when the item comes up for plotting. Thanks for the advice.

Now, any ideas on what I need to edit to access:

location.Color_of_Car
location.Make_of_Car
and
location.Age_of_Car

from Google.tpl just like you can access: location.displayName or location.displayAddress?

Frustrating.

Got the SQL and Smarty right. Know where to put the Smarty. Still not sure on the SQL.

Really thought /CRM/Contact/BAO/Contact/Location.php was where I needed to change the SQL joins to add new fields to the contact that is passed to Google.tpl in the $location box.

Any other ideas?

sorry - no suggestions other than the one above which you won't like at this point about jumping ship to OpenLayers

sorry - no suggestions other than the one above which you won't like at this point about jumping ship to OpenLayers

I wouldn't mind it if I wasn't so close.

Joining information on a lookup from another table in location.php function function &getMapInfo should be where Google.tpl actually gets the data to map, right? So Why can't the data I join that isn't "native" to $location being pulled in?