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To response the recent emails and questions that I’ve been asked of What and How Mappoint together with VB/VB.NET/VBA programming languages can help improve your business by targeting your customers based on the UK geographic location, I have published the following code/tips and alone with a real world scenario that my program is trying to solve. Hope this would help!


A well-known restaurant chain has 70 odd branches across the UK. The restaurant Management promote its specific seasonal offers in a regular basis for each their branches only to the customer who lives within 2 miles radius distance. For central London however, 0.5 miles of distance is thought to be appropriate for their direct mailing campaign. Overlapping is strictly prohibited, as it would confuse customer if they receive two letters from two different branches.

More than 50,000 of their customer list was given in a format of MS Excel with full address and the UK postcode.

A solution was written by using VB.NET that calls an instance of Mappoint to measure the two address one at a time and pick up the qualified record from customer list and then output this record with the store code to a new file.


The most important measurement is handled by the following syntax;

Radius = locMaster.DistanceTo(oMap.FindResults(dr("PostCode "))(1))



Of course, you need to declare all your variables, including create instance of Mappoint at the beginning of your program;

Dim locMaster As MapPoint.Location

…
objApp = New MapPoint.Application
objApp.Units = MapPoint.GeoUnits.geoMiles
…

I used a loop that loops thru all our customer list by using a SqlDataReader dr().


While dr.Read

Radius = locMaster.DistanceTo(oMap.FindResults(dr("PostCode "))(1))

If Radius <= CType(txtRadius.Text, Double) Then
txtFileText.Text += strAddress(dr("CustomerID"), dr("Title"), dr("FirstName"), dr("LastName"), dr("Address1"), dr("PostTown"), dr("SubTown"), dr("SubLoca"), dr("County"), dr("PostCode")) & Trim(StoreCode.Text) & vbCrLf
iFounder = iFounder + 1
End If

If CInt(RecodRequired.Text) = i2Founder Then
Exit While
End If

End While
dr.Close()

I have also used a loop counter; iFounder to counts how many founds since sometime restaurant requires certain number of records from their list. For example, 200 for central London while 500 for Birmingham’s branch…etc

this should be;

If CInt(RecodRequired.Text) = iFounder Then

Sub Macro2()
'
' Macro2 Macro
' Macro recorded 06/10/2003 by Daniel Fountain
'
Dim objApp As MapPoint.Application
Dim objMap As MapPoint.Map
Dim objLoc1 As MapPoint.Location
Dim objLoc2 As MapPoint.Location
Dim objCenter As MapPoint.Location

'//open MapPoint and create a new map
Set objApp = New MapPoint.Application
objApp.Visible = True
objApp.UserControl = True
objApp.Activate
Set objMap = objApp.NewMap

objApp.Units = MapPoint.GeoUnits.geoMiles

objLoc1 = objMap.FindResults("IP1 5HN")(1)
objLoc1.DistanceTo (objMap.FindResults("IP5 3UT")(1))

'
End Sub

The error is on the "objLoc1 = objMap.FindResults("IP1 5HN")(1)" line and it says "object vairiable or with block object vairable not set"

Which version of Mappoint are you installed on your PC? If it's Mappoint 2000 or earlier, FindResult() has to have City/Town string variable and postcode to together for it to work. don't know why.

mine is MP 2002.

hope this help.

its MP2002 europe - does the euro bit make a difference to this conversation?

objLoc1 = objMap.FindResults("IP1 5HN")(1)

should read

set objLoc1 = objMap.FindResults("IP1 5HN")(1)

;-]