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Here is what we would like to do:

Use the route planner to generate a route as well as a boundary around that route. Let's say the route would be from Boston to New York and we want to have a 25 mile boundary along that route. Now, I want to export all zip codes that either fall within that boundary or cross that boundary. The catch is, I don't want this from data I've already imported, I just want the standard zip codes already in MapPoint.

Hi,

Programatically this is possible. You make a shape around the route and get all zip code.

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rgds, Wilfried Mestdagh
www.mestdagh.biz
www.comfortsoftware.be
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Wilfried, is it possible to give some general guidance on how you would draw up a shape like this along a route using code. I had a similar issue a few months back and couldn’t come up with a solution so I ended up drawing free form sausage shapes!! The other idea I had was to set waypoints at small intervals along the route and then find postcode (zip) centroids within 25km of each one but again I couldn’t figure out how to add in the waypoints.

Rgds

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David
UK mapping and map analysis services at www.broomanalysis.plus.com

Depends on how accurate and how bendy the roads are!

You need some locations along the route. The individual directions have locations but these are for views of that particular direction. These might be good enough but there's no guarantee that they'll actually be on the road route.

The alternative would be to set the route to "shortest distance" and add lots of rest stops (every few minutes). Then extract the locations for each rest stop. These will be on the route.

Then you use some geometry to find two points on each side of these central points. Then connect up into a polygon. You will need to code the geometry yourself - finding the normal to the route is probably a good start, then project outwards.

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Winwaed Software Technology LLC
http://www.winwaed.com
See http://www.mapping-tools.com for MapPoint Tools
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I did try the ‘rest stops at tiny intervals’ strategy, with the idea being to identify each postcode sector centroid within 25km of a rest stop and then sift out duplicates. If I recall rightly what happened, on motorways and fast dual-carriageways the rest stops become much further apart because of the scarcity of junctions and when you plot the results the sausage gets very narrow along these stretches!!

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David
UK mapping and map analysis services at www.broomanalysis.plus.com

Hi,

I think the thechnique that Richard describes is the best one to go

__________________
rgds, Wilfried Mestdagh
www.mestdagh.biz
www.comfortsoftware.be
MapPoint coding demo
Order MapPoint 2009 with Routing and User Tools Spreadsheet

This is a bit academic but another question. If you calculate a route from A to B and then trace that route with the scribble or freeform tool, is it possible to work out latitude and longitudes for points along that line, say at 1km intervals. I can see how that would then be a basis for drawing an accurate shape around the route and calculating zips.

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David
UK mapping and map analysis services at www.broomanalysis.plus.com

I’ve just realised that it’s possible to draw the sausage shape along a route by using Find Nearby on the route. Therefore it must be straightforward with some code to output all the zip centroids falling into the shape.

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David
UK mapping and map analysis services at www.broomanalysis.plus.com

Hi David,

I thought that this was the problem:

" The catch is, I don't want this from data I've already imported, I just want the standard zip codes already in MapPoint."

Mike Mattys

davidb: If there is a long distance between two points, then why not simply interpolate between the two points?

To do it properly, you should interpolate along a great circle arc, but for the tens of miles at a 'temperate' latitude (doesn't work for polar regions!) that I think we're talking about, then a simple linear interpolation should be okay.

__________________
Winwaed Software Technology LLC
http://www.winwaed.com
See http://www.mapping-tools.com for MapPoint Tools
See the Geoweb Guru for online mapping