Cartographer

Cartographer generates painless Google Maps for your Rails application. It supports Google Maps API v3 & comes with all the goodies (MarkerManager && MarkerClusterer) for managing large number of markers with least effort.

Features

• Support for Google Maps v3 and v2
• Drop-in-replacement for older version of cartographer (which only worked with google maps v2)
• Support for MarkerManager v3
• Support for MarkerClusterer v3
• You can easily define custom icons for cluster
• Works with Rails 3+ and also works on older rails versions to provide backward compatibility

How to use?

if you want to use google maps v3, set this constant as first line of environment.rb (this constant should be set before the plugins are loaded, its best to keep on first line)

 CARTOGRAPHER_GMAP_VERSION = 3

In your controller...

@map = Cartographer::Gmap.new( 'map' )
@map.zoom = :bound
@icon = Cartographer::Gicon.new()
@map.icons <<  @icon
marker1 = Cartographer::Gmarker.new(:name=> "taj_mahal", :marker_type => "Building",
           :position => [27.173006,78.042086],
           :info_window_url => "/url_for_info_content", :icon => @icon)
marker2 = Cartographer::Gmarker.new(:name=> "raj_bhawan", :marker_type => "Building",
           :position => [28.614309,77.201353],
           :info_window_url => "/url_for_info_content", :icon => @icon)

@map.markers << marker1
@map.markers << marker2

In your view...

  # for Rails 3+ you need to make use of 'raw'
  <%= raw Cartographer::Header.new.to_s %>
  <%= raw @map.to_html %>

Here is another example with custom icons + clustering

  #controller code
  @map = Cartographer::Gmap.new( 'map' )
  @map.zoom = :bound
  @map.marker_clusterer = true

  icon_building = Cartographer::Gicon.new(:name => "building_icon",
          :image_url => '/images/icon.gif',
          :width => 31,
          :height => 24,
          :anchor_x => 0,
          :anchor_y => 20,
          :info_anchor_x => 5,
          :info_anchor_x => 1)

  building_cluster_icon = Cartographer::ClusterIcon.new({:marker_type => "Building"})
  #Clustering requires various variant of icon for different grouping/zoom level
  #push first variant
  building_cluster_icon << {
                 :url => '/images/small_icon.gif',
                 :height => 33,
                 :width => 58,
                 :opt_anchor => [10, 0],
                 :opt_textColor => 'black'
               }
  #push second variant
  building_cluster_icon << {
                 :url => '/images/bigger_icon.gif',
                 :height => 63,
                  :width => 98,
                 :opt_anchor => [20, 0],
                 :opt_textColor => 'black'
               }

  #push third variant
  building_cluster_icon << {
                 :url => '/images/biggest_icon.gif',
                 :height => 73,
                 :width => 118,
                 :opt_anchor => [26, 0],
                 :opt_textColor => 'black'
               }

  @map.marker_clusterer_icons = [building_cluster_icon]


  marker1 = Cartographer::Gmarker.new(:name=> "taj_mahal", :marker_type => "Building",
              :position => [27.173006,78.042086],
              :info_window_url => "/url_for_info_content",
              :icon => icon_building)
  marker2 = Cartographer::Gmarker.new(:name=> "raj_bhawan", :marker_type => "Building",
              :position => [28.614309,77.201353],
              :info_window_url => "/url_for_info_content",
              :icon => icon_building)

  @map.markers << marker1
  @map.markers << marker2

Sample app

If you want a quickest way to get started, you can download a sample app here https://github.com/downloads/parolkar/cartographer/carto_test.tgz Its a rails 3 app, run the server and point your browser to http://localhost:3000/welcome/index

Install

  cd rails_app
  git clone git://github.com/parolkar/cartographer.git vendor/plugins/cartographer

History:

Announcement of Cartographer's new avatar on Ruby5 Podcast : http://bit.ly/fSWCfh

Original Rails blog announcement of 2005 is at http://download.rubyonrails.com/2005/8/30/cartographer-effortless-google-maps-in-rails

Copyright (c) 2011 Abhishek Parolkar & Joshua Miller, released under the MIT license