MapForums

Hi.

Can somebody help me with the following problem.

I work in Service and our department deals with service territories, which are spreaded over all Canada. One territory consists of a group of postal codes.

Per my undestanding (I have just started to use this tool) I cannot create territories based on Canadian Postal Codes (but I can do this with US Zip Codes).

Can someone tells me if there is a add-ins or another decision that I can use in order to resolve my problem.

Thank you in advance!

Penka

I think you can do it.. you can make territories with Forward Sortation Areas (FSA)'s anyway.. take a look at the following screenshots around Toronto. You can see that the FSA's are fairly small, not that huge anyway.



Click here for the full screenshot --
http://www.mp2kmag.com/images/mappoint/canada_fsas.gif

Hope this helps,
Eric

__________________

Thanks for the suggestion, Eric.

It works at some point but at some doesn't.

The problem arised from the circumstance that we have several different territories with the same FSA. These territories are unique from the psostal code point of view bust as fare as it is related to the FSA (the first three characters of the postal code) they are repeting. For example"

ID Territory FSA
488 13104T M5G
622 13116T M5G
3227 41931T M5G
3346 77701T M5G

Mappoint doesn't allow one geographic area(region) to be related to different territories. In this case no one of these territories has been ctreated on the map.

Any idea how I can solve this problem?

Thanks in advance!

Penka

We've had the same problem here and my solution was to buy a "canadian postal code" database. This database featured ALL canadian postal (not just the forward sortation area) and also their Longitude/Latitude (there are over 800'000 records in this database!). The database is in access format.

What you *could* do is run a query of your territories table along with the postal code table and extract the longitude/latitude of the postal codes per territories. You could then import each territory's postal codes separately and draw a polygon around it?

If you're interested obtaining this database here's the link:
http://www.zipcodedownload.com/Produ...dard/Overview/

Hope this helps

Sonicman

Thank for the suggestion, Sonicman!

I probably will consider buying Canadian Postal Codes database.

Can you please help me a little bit further?

I understood your idea but I don know how I will be able after I manualy draw the territories by their longitude/latitude (it won't be easy because I have 226 territories) to present different metrics as "Service Revenue" or "Service Cost" by territory?!

Mappoint won't accept to import those metrics (revenue etc.) by postal code or by territories, that were created by me, because it won't consider them as a valid options to import data to.

Perhaps I have missed something of your idea.

I would be very glad if you can help me further!!! I have to find a decision as soon as possible.

Penka

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We've had the same problem here and my solution was to buy a "canadian postal code" database. This database featured ALL canadian postal (not just the forward sortation area) and also their Longitude/Latitude (there are over 800'000 records in this database!). The database is in access format.

What you *could* do is run a query of your territories table along with the postal code table and extract the longitude/latitude of the postal codes per territories. You could then import each territory's postal codes separately and draw a polygon around it?

If you're interested obtaining this database here's the link:
http://www.zipcodedownload.com/Produ...dard/Overview/

Hope this helps

Sonicman

hmmm well you may indeed have too much territories to draw.

My idea was to:
a) import each territory's postalcodes in seperate dataset of different colors and have pushpins placed for each dataset (each postalcode have it's pushpin).
b) once you have each dataset placed on the map, since they are in different colors my idea was to draw a polygon BY HAND around the pushpins....

I don'T think there is a way to draw them by programming and lat/lon. It would just create a continuous line between EACH pushpin and this isn't what you want. You want to create a shape that connects the pushpins that are actually part of the territory "boundary", which would require Albert Einstein and some very complex calculations to determine!

So I guess your solution is to do them by hand. Believe me, even if you have 226 of those, once the pushpins are in place it will be faster than programming this up.

Unless someone else have another idea ?

Sonicman