NSurvey provides charting reporting by default, but this could be enhanced by using the Country List control together with the added Belgian Regions. With this question in a survey, as a required question, every entry would have location information. Together with MapPoint a graphical overview could be made, showing additional information per country and region.

To accomplish this, I created a new administration page and edited the UINavigator and HeaderControl classes to add the new page to the menu. On this page were two dropdown lists which included the column names of a survey’s text entries. These lists were used to indicate where NSurvey stored the Country and Region questions. Together with a button that would generate the chart.



To generate the chart, all possible regions were first collected by grouping the entries and storing the unique country and regions. After this, the MapPoint FindService was instantiated and the Find method was called for each address.

[csharp]
FindServiceSoap findService = new FindServiceSoap();
if (ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["MapPointProxy"] != String.Empty) {
findService.Proxy = this.proxyObject;
}
findService.Credentials = this.ourCredentials;
findService.PreAuthenticate = true;

FindSpecification findSpec = new FindSpecification();
findSpec.DataSourceName = "MapPoint.EU";

foreach (DictionaryEntry locationEntry in locationData) {
// key example: "West-Vlaanderen, BE"
findSpec.InputPlace = locationEntry.Key.ToString();
FindResults foundResults = findService.Find(findSpec);
if (foundResults.NumberFound > 0) {
((CustomLocation)locationEntry.Value).LatLong =
foundResults.Results[0].FoundLocation.LatLong;
}
}
[/csharp]

This gave me the LatLong of every location MapPoint had found, which I used to create an array of Location objects to be passed to the GetBestMapView method. This method returned a MapViewRepresentations object which described to view to use when calling the GetMap method. This view assured every location was on it.

[csharp]
MapViewRepresentations mapRepresentations =
renderService.GetBestMapView(myLocations, "MapPoint.EU");
ViewByHeightWidth[] myViews = new ViewByHeightWidth[1];
myViews[0] = mapRepresentations.ByHeightWidth;
[/csharp]

At this point all required location information was known, the only thing left was to define pushpins that would show up on the generated map and would be clickable.

[csharp]
Pushpin[] myPushpins = new Pushpin[foundRegions.Count];
Int32 pinCounter = 0;
foreach (DictionaryEntry foundRegion in foundRegions) {
myPushpins[pinCounter] = new Pushpin();
myPushpins[pinCounter].IconDataSource = "MapPoint.Icons";
myPushpins[pinCounter].IconName = "1"; // Red pin
Int32 nrResults = ((CustomLocation)foundRegion.Value).ResultCount;
myPushpins[pinCounter].Label = String.Format("{0} {1}",
nrResults,
(nrResults == 1) ? "result" : "results");
myPushpins[pinCounter].LatLong = (LatLong)foundRegion.Key;
myPushpins[pinCounter].ReturnsHotArea = true;
myPushpins[pinCounter].PinID =
(CustomLocation)foundRegion.Value).Location();
pinCounter++;
}
[/csharp]

To get the map, I had to call the GetMap method and supply a MapSpecification. This specification describes the size of the map, the quality, the pushpins and what MapPoint should return. Here, it will return a URL, pointing to the generated map.

[csharp]
MapSpecification mapSpec = new MapSpecification();
mapSpec.DataSourceName = "MapPoint.EU";
mapSpec.Views = myViews;
mapSpec.Options = new MapOptions();
mapSpec.Options.ReturnType = MapReturnType.ReturnUrl;
mapSpec.Options.Format = new ImageFormat();
mapSpec.Options.Format.Height = 500;
mapSpec.Options.Format.Width = 500;
mapSpec.Options.Style = MapStyle.Locator;
mapSpec.Pushpins = myPushpins;
MapImage[] mapImages = renderService.GetMap(mapSpec);
[/csharp]

After the call, MapPoint returned a MapImage object, containg the url to the map, together with information about the special areas on the map, called HotAreas. To make these areas clickable on the map, an HTML imagemap had to be generated.

[csharp]
StringBuilder imageMapName = new StringBuilder();
imageMapName.Append("");
this.imageMapHotAreas.Text = imageMapName.ToString();
mapObject.Attributes["USEMAP"] = "#" + mapObject.ID + "_Map";
[/csharp]

The result was a map, scaled to the best size to include all locations, with pushpins on it, which are clickable and point to the same page with an additional querystring.



This made it possible to visualize the results per region, and when you select a certain region, provide filtered results of that region.