A point in the right direction

[djkhalif]

Good afternoon all,

My CF App is at about 75% complete and now I want to add another unsolicited piece.

1. Map of Manufacturing layout

2. Display Inventory in different locations of plant (like Google Map API)

3. Make each point selectable to display details.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for tools to build the app?

Thanks,

djkhalif

[BKBK]

1. Map of Manufacturing layout

Snap pictures of the layout, and display those.

2. Display Inventory in different locations of plant (like Google Map API)

Contact them Googly people and request a key. Place a link at each location to point to a CFM page containing the inventory.

3. Make each point selectable to display details.

Points? What points? You lost me there. In any case, you can bury links under thumbnails, or a use a set of navigation links to take the user to the right place.

[tooMuchTrouble · Accepted solution]

do you have a blueprint of the factory? if yes, you can either turn it into an imagemap --or-- into a "real" map & serve it using some spatial data server like geoServer (free). the inventory locations can be added as points to your map database or as imagemap & queried or clicked on to return details.

unless your factory is one honking big one, google maps won't work--it's data is too coarse.

tools:

- geoserver (serve spatial data, guess you'd want to use WMS & WFS protocols)

- qGIS (edit/create spatial data)

- postGIS (store spatial data)

- openscales (flex port of openlayers GIS web client, pretty slick)

[djkhalif]

PaulH,

Thanks. I take it you must have done this before. I really appreciate the information.

Thanks again,

djkhalif

[BKBK]

"My CF App" made me think you're looking for a solution in Coldfusion. I imagined your Manufacturing App to be compared to a store, with branches  in different geographical locations (where Google comes in), and you want layouts for the sections in each store.

I do believe you can implement such a solution in Coldfusion 9. You say your application is 75% complete. If you choose to use map servers, you will need time to learn about them, and probably extra software, hardware or human resources, too. Then you would likely find that your application is 30% complete.

[djkhalif]

BKBK,

Thanks. I'm going to install CF9 Developer to get the feel of the map tag. There is a video by Raymond Camden demonstrating cfmap. My next question would be, can I import our floor plan? But, i'll post my results.

Thanks,

djkhalif

[tooMuchTrouble]

you can certainly add your own local data to google maps:

http://geoinformatics.sut.ac.th/campusMap/campusMap.html

alpha version of an app that serves local spatial data (vector shapefiles of the

campus's infrastructure) from geoserver as custom tile overlays w/google maps as

raster background. uses google's flex lib.

but again, unless your plant is one ginormous factory, you won't like the

results. don't believe me? try zooming into one of the buildings on that map.

can you actually zoom "inside" one?

google maps is meant for another scale entirely.

[djkhalif]

Paul,

The plan is to use the drawing of our floor to show location of products during WIP (Work In Progress). Our terminating points are Inventory or Shipping. So, we want to add our own map and our own data.

Khalif Abdo-Baari

Khalif Industries

www.dasouthsider.com

Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:52:31 -0700

From: forums@adobe.com

To: khalifmoi@hotmail.com

Subject: A point in the right direction

you can certainly add your own local data to google maps:

http://geoinformatics.sut.ac.th/campusMap/campusMap.html

alpha version of an app that serves local spatial data (vector shapefiles of the

campus's infrastructure) from geoserver as custom tile overlays w/google maps as

raster background. uses google's flex lib.

but again, unless your plant is one ginormous factory, you won't like the

results. don't believe me? try zooming into one of the buildings on that map.

can you actually zoom "inside" one?

google maps is meant for another scale entirely.

>

[tooMuchTrouble]

forget google maps.

factory plan in autocad? easiest to convert to shapefile, even better to

georeference it to some local coordinate system (unless your db is postgres, if

so then go all in & use postGIS to store your spatial data). use geoserver to

serve that up. link attributes of your spatial data to whatever db you're using

for the app (a road is a line--that's spatial data, the roads attribute data is

it's name, number of lanes, road surface, etc.)

if you want sexy client, flex (frankly we only do flex front ends for our maps

anymore) or if you like JS better have a look at openlayers JS client (ajaxian).

you could also do it with simple cfhttp calls & HTML.

as i mentioned earlier, use WMS protocol to produce map images, WFS to query

spatial objects (what's the name of that room) or find stuff via their

attributes (where is order number 55 at now), and WFS-T to manage spatial data

(the "T" stands for transactional).