Hi All,

Anyone know of a way to ZoomTo a bunch of shapes.

I know how to ZoomTo a dataset (pushpins) or GoTo a location but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent method for shapes.

I'm importing a load of shapes onto a map and all I want to do is display all the shapes centered on the map view. I thought about using the Union and GoTo method but getting what could be thousands of shape vertices into an array is really slow!

Any ideas?

From where are you importing the shapes?

I wonder if in your code you could determine the min and max latitudes and longitudes, then you could drop four invisible pushpins onto the map and zoom to that?

Eric

Hi Eric - thanks for your reply.

What I'm actually doing is reading a .ptm (which contains some shapes) and doing a 'copy/paste' onto a visible map (user chooses which shapes they want to see) and it's the resulting map/shapes that I want to 'zoomto'.

Than still you need to retrieve all the shapes from the "active map" and check them one by one to get the upper-left corner to lower right corner location. Just like Eric said, make to "unvisible" pushpins of it, put those pushpin to a seperate DataSet and than perform ZoomTo for that particular Dataset. I guess that's the only way you can do that. I don't know how to do it elseway.

There's an article Walt Cygan wrote that exports the map's shapes to mif/mid text files --
Spatial Data Importer Contest Submission - MP2K Magazine

You don't have to do all that, but check out the Vertices property on the Shape object --
Vertices property

Returns or sets the array of Location objects that comprise the beginning and ending points for line shapes and the points where angles meet for freeform shapes. The shape must have a Type property of geoLine or geoFreeform. Read/write Variant.


You would basically have to Loop over the Shapes collection...

The Shapes collection contains all the shapes on the map. Shapes are returned in z-order from front to back. This collection remains valid after the map is closed and then reopened. This collection supports the Visual Basic For Each...Next statement.
To learn more about drawing shapes on maps, see the About using shapes in MapPoint and Getting started with shapes reference topics.


... and then look at the vertices of each Shape. The Vertices are Location objects and you can use the Latitude / Longitude properties in MapPoint 2006 to check the lat/lon's.

Note that if you are using MapPoint 2004 then you will have to use a hack to get the lat/lon's --

A More Compact Method for Obtaining Lat/Long - MapPoint Articles - MP2K Magazine

hope this helps!

Eric

Thanks again for your replies Eric & VC_Man!

Yep - tried all that - but when there could be 10 or 15 shapes - each with between 2 and 3 thousand vertices that's really slow!

Maybe I'll just leave it to the user to manually zoom to the right place!

Cheers

If you are getting the shapes from ESRI SHP files, there is a property inherent in the file(s) known as the "bounding box" for each shape. It's easy to re-open the SHP file and extract just this information, which is exactly what you need to properly zoom/pan the ActiveMap window.

If you use the Spatial Data Importer, the VB source code actually demonstrates reading the bounding box info, although it doesn't make use of it. It's in the module ESRIShapeParser, method GenerateRegions(), after the line
"If eShapeType = m_eShapeType Then"

If you're using MapInfo files, you easily can derive a bounding box while parsing the points of a region.

HTH
Paul

Originally Posted by jlewis

Hi Eric - thanks for your reply.

What I'm actually doing is reading a .ptm (which contains some shapes) and doing a 'copy/paste' onto a visible map (user chooses which shapes they want to see) and it's the resulting map/shapes that I want to 'zoomto'.

So your application know whitch shapes are copied ? Then you can have the Location object from each shape and zoom to it with the method Eric has told ?