Feature request for field type

[Mike Sturmey]

Hi,

It would be great if there was a field type similar to ‘location’ but not based on GPS that would allow a base plan to be uploaded and then for each record be able to place a pin on the plan to stipulate the location. An example being a plan of a large greenhouse and the ability place a pin which would indicate the exact position a plant was,

kind regards,
Mike

[Sam Moffatt]

That’s a really cool idea, a sort of “map” field where you upload the base map and then it’s the same drop pin experience.

Right now the location field just displays a textual label and you have to click in to see the actual positioning. The text field is populated generally with an address, with this new type what would you expect to see in it?

It also occurs to me that a cool improvement for the current location and also this new map type might be pre-rendered image for display on the layout that didn’t provide editing but just had a static image centred on the pin location.

[Mike Sturmey]

Hi Sam,

I was thinking similar to the photo field with a thumbnail of the plan – clicking on it would show an enlarged view with a dot on the plan to show the location for that database entry. The plan would be the same for every record. There would be no point in showing a text result, only the XY coordinates on the drawing. I have attached an example for a given record. It would also be useful for showing position of inventory in a warehouse etc

cheers
Mike

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Brendan]

Interesting idea. But I wonder how many people would use it? And would it be the same sort of thing where each pin was a separate record?

[Sam Moffatt]

I think this with a bit of work could be interesting with the embedded aspect. I think the ability more generically to be able to render a point, or set of points, over an image is useful. I think that’d be interesting for layouts that are intended to be printed (custom or default) and would see that as a useful improvement for the current location field type as well where the base image is sourced from Maps (maybe have to use OSM data for legal reasons). I think it requires some thought to zoom and cropping considerations with the rendered images and point overlay but I could see a use for this feature. I think at least an improvement to be able to print a map for the current location field would be useful and then from there this feature isn’t too far away.

One other thing I’ve wanted for a while is a polyline feature for overlaying a series of points on a map for mapping road trips. I’ve done the individual points as an import and overlaid that in the map mode but the point aggregation messes with making it a smooth line. In that case it’d be a single parent record and a series of child points (perhaps modelled like a table field with a map renderer and the option to connect points).

The major aspect is the ability to compose a point over the top of an image which can be done for maps today but can’t be done with custom imagery. That just made me wonder about custom tilemaps for something like Minecraft map renders but that’s a much larger can of worms and definitely out of scope.

It occurs to me that a while back someone was using a custom layout to do a similar sort of use case except with seating arrangements. I think that might have been Gregory where he used a base image and then overlaid fields to get a sort of seat map effect. One might be able to replicate something like that with this where each record represents a seat and you get a visual map of where that seat is. Taking that one step further if a version of the map view was used you could click to select records using a seating layout as a base to pan around. The next step could be to create a three form layout: seat, ticket and show. Seat is that original use case, ticket could be expanded to include a link to seat and perhaps a script field to automatically extract the seat location from the linked seat record into an equivalent field in the ticket and then a show allows filtering the tickets by show through another link so that you can display all of the seats sold for a show. One could conceive of using a similar sort of setup for a restaurant though it has a temporal aspect potentially as well (which would be another level of awesomeness, time window slider + map overlay to filter records).

I already do something similar for the scripting where I have a set of “known” locations and use that to automatically populate a location field in a form using a field script. I type into the location field a known location name and it replaces the field with the fixed location.

As an aside, I built a thing like this many moons ago for a library use case for mapping back where a book was in a library. When you found a book you were interested in, you could click a button and it’d show you were the book was in the library. In that situation I ended up precomposing images mapping to shelves however I would have killed for today when location services on mobile devices is much more accurate to do a really cool find the book experience.

That ended up longer than I expected…

[Brendan]

Now wouldn’t that book library idea be cool with AirTags support! Tag all your books and run around the library with your iPhone and it tells you if you’re close to the book you’re looking for. Using location services mapping where each book tag is located and storing that in a database.

[Author]

Posts