Make push pins over country and city dynamically

Question

Hi

im new to Bing maps and I want push pins over every country and city, without plotting in everyone manually.

What is the best way to do this?

I want the push pins to show in the zoomed in area, but not load pins outside the view, as that would be a lot.

I understand push pins need latitude and longitude, is there a online list i can use to collect data live?

thx

Answer 1

The best way to do this is to download a list of all countries and cities with their coordinates. These exist all over the web for free. And then overlay this data on Bing Maps. To do the search approach you are mentioning you will want to do something similar to this: http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/dynamically-updating-data-in-bing-maps-v7/

---

http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com

Answer 2

thanks! that helped a lot, worked like a charm.

wish there was an easier way to just pull country names from the map tho, since they are already there.

im trying to use userMapView to find a location by query http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff701711.aspx 

or download list from GeoNames, but then there will be a lot of coding I guess...... hope im going in the right direction.

---

EGJ

Answer 3

You could always host the data in the Bing Spatial Data Services. This would get rid of the need to create a web service for connecting to the data and already has all the spatial search functionality built in.

---

http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com

Answer 4

You could always host the data in the Bing Spatial Data Services. This would get rid of the need to create a web service for connecting to the data and already has all the spatial search functionality built in.

---

http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com

Not at the moment you can't - aren't the Bing Spatial Data Services shut down pending investigation of some issues?

---

twitter: @alastaira blog: http://alastaira.wordpress.com/

Answer 5

The Spatial Data Services are back up and running as usual. The issue was limited to the uploading and batch geocoding functionalities. All data sources uploaded before the issue occured earlier in the week were still accessible.

---

http://rbrundritt.wordpress.com