Our team faced a trial recently wherein we needed to know the user's rough latitude/longitude.
Our dream was to be able to have the user zoom into a map and click where he/she lives.
Any thoughts for how this information might be polled without teeth-pulling?
We know lat/long can be relatively easily looked up online or on one's phone, but asking a user for this information seems unwieldy: that's simply not something that people know off the top of their head. 😵
- We could go for lat/long of nearest state/city (we have that information in lat/long format), however the results are not quite granular enough as cities can be quite large. [this was the option we chose as-- despite being rough, it was quick to implement]
- We could go for the straight forward ask the user, but this isn't an intuitive practice as explained above, and typing in a long string of numbers welcomes mistakes.
- Is there an extension that would do the trick?
- What about polling an external websource? I've never done this, but I imagine with a web connector it would work.
- Is there a way of creating a dynamic "mesh" over the map view, so when the user clicks, the latitude & longitude were saved using a parameter action? I tried doing this with BINS but it refused to play nicely.
- Thought: should I go old-school and create two files: one of every possible Latitude and one of every Longitude, join them for a REALLY BIG flat file?
Thank you for your thoughts!
One thing I've done previously is create a grid overlay. Essentially, that overlay contains thousands of locations in the US. That overlay is transparent but sits on top of the actual map, allowing people to select their location. You can see this in the "Map Overlay" section of the following: https://www.flerlagetwins.com/2019/05/parameter-actions.html. This example has 27,000 locations, but depending on your needs, this may not be granular enough.
