Re: Suggestion for an "imagemap-like" location feature -- methods?

From: MWells (outbound__at_sygnal.com)
Date: 01/15/05 

Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 18:31:44 +1300

Hi Kat, there's a good layer of dust in this part of my mental technical
archives, so I leave the implementation details to you.

As I recall, the original image map technology, which I remember being
referred to as "server side imagemaps", could be used to determine the X, Y
coordinate within an image that a user clicked on. It was fairly
straightforward; you add a tag to your image (ISMAP, maybe) and a Url, and
when the user clicks somewhere on the image, a hit is made to your Url.
Again lots of dust here; check this carefully but I recall that the Url was
in a nonstandard format, something like;

/somepage.aspx?23,48

I.e. you have a querystring but it's not a typical key-value querystring.
You'll need to process it a little differently; grab the entire querystring
and split on the comma, or something similar.

The point is, it should be easy to create an administration page that allows
you to modify the details of an Office record.

Within this page, you could show the floorplan contain the star of the
current location of the office. Then if the admin-user clicks on the
imagemap, you capture the new X, Y, and update the Office record.

This is about the cheapest, crudest, simplest way I can think of to capture
image coordinates through a web app.

If you're lucky, there may be some javascript that can respond to the click,
and allow you to create a true ASP.NET control using true ASP.NET postbacks
and so on. If you're fantastically lucky, someone may have done this for
you already.

The trickiest part will be making sure that you know the OfficeID that the
X, Y should be applied to on the receiving page. You may need to insert the
OfficeID into the Url that's posted back to, so that you can process it out
at the receiving end. On that note, the Hyperlink control may give you the
capabilities you need, or you may be able to derive from it to get the right
capabilities.

Other approaches;

+ Use Flash
+ Use a WinForms application for capturing the X, Y clicks and updating the
Office records
+ Use ASP.NET but give the user some up, down, left, right arrows rather
than the ability to click on the image.
+ Use ASP.NET but put a series of small clickable carats along the top and
left of the floorplan image. These would be standard LinkButtons with a
small graphical carat. Clicking these would set the X or Y, respectively to
a value matching the position of the carat.
+ Build an ActiveX control
+ Build a .NET winforms control that's delivered to the webpage (the user
must have .NET installed however).

HTML is quite limited from this perspective, but I'm fairly certain the
tools are there if you're willing to make them work.

Best of luck;

/// M

"KatB" <nospam@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:eZdOOVk#EHA.3616@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
> Kevin, very helpful, thanks. If I use a floor plan image with all the
> office names already on it, and then just add a star graphic or
> something to indicate the position requested...how would I know the
> position of where to draw the star?
>
> I assume I would have a db table of person, office number, and then the
> coordinates of the "star". How would I determine those coordinates?
> Sorry, if I'm being stupid!
>
> In the meantime, I'll go read up on system.drawing having not used it
> before.
>
> Thanks, Kat
>
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