SeedCode’s ProMaps template comes with support for “neighborhoods” or areas: shapes our users employ to depict things like sales territories or city borders. Usually, these areas are a single, contiguous shape, like the neighborhoods in Seattle shown in red below in a stock copy of ProMaps.

Stock copy of ProMaps showing neighborhood areas in red

But what if an area consists of multiple separated shapes? Much of the time, city, municipal, and congressional boundaries are not just made up of one simple shape, but a set of multiple shapes. Or maybe you want to represent something like national forest boundaries or oil fields as in the examples below:

Oil fields in Indiana; all red areas are one “area” in ProMaps

Zoomed in on oil fields.

It turns out that this can be done with a very small tweak to ProMaps. To do this, we need to first define how to separate the multiple arrays of latitude/longitude pairs for one area. For this example, we’ll stick with formatting similar to JSON. This means each polygon will be wrapped in brackets ( [ ] ), and separated with a comma. When specifying multiple polygons, our object is going to be an array of arrays, so everything will need to be enclosed in brackets to define it as a single array object. Here’s the template for how multi-polygon area data should look:

The next step is to update the “Set Variable [ $sc_areaBorderCoordinates…” script step on line 26 of the “Export Map HTML” script. We’ll update the calculation value with the following:

It’s important to note that we’re sticking with ProMaps’ use of return characters to indicate the separation between each lat/long pair. Because of this, it’s vital that you follow the format in the example (no extra line breaks), or the substitute function will result in a malformed object.

With this one script change and formatted data, you’ll be able to see multiple polygons drawn on the map for a single area!

Learn more about the ProMaps template

Using a different icon and pin colors on your map is a great way to visualize found sets. Fortunately, ProMaps for FileMaker makes it easy to assign different icons based on different values in your fields. Sometimes, though, you may want to create icons and color combinations on the fly.

Brian Ouimette and Jonathan Sherry at Full City Consulting have come up with a great looking icon selector for ProMaps. This allows them to create markers, set a color, then choose between a pin icon or truck icon, and the marker image will be automatically rendered by their scripts.

To make this happen, their FileMaker scripts perform the following steps:

• Custom JavaScript code is loaded in a new web viewer
• That code is passed preset SVG shape data
• The JavaScript code converts that SVG shape data into a PNG based on the selected color
• That new PNG image is passed back as a parameter in a FileMaker script using the FMP URL protocol, just like ProMaps and DayBack
• The image is then saved into the marker’s container field in ProMaps

While the scripting is a bit complicated, the end result is really easy for schedulers:

Thanks, Brian and Jonathan for putting together this great example!

(For more on creating icons on the fly, checkout using the Google API to generate pins.)