http://www.proofgroup.com/blog/2008/nov/google_mapping_redux

POST is the answer, but unfortunately FileMaker doesn’t give us POST natively in the Web Viewer. Your solution, to use the plugin, is innovative, but you actually ran into problems with the FileMaker implementation of the “data URI scheme”. I had seen this, too. The Google API key is based on the ‘Host’. For a hosted file, this is the server address. For a local file, this is usually blank (and Google allows any API to be used with a blank host). However, in this case, FileMaker is *not* giving us a blank Host. It is returning a Host which looks like this: ‘2071A046-D389-4811-A9DC-E3F1D27E3DC9′.

Loading some simple JavaScript via ‘data:text/html’ will show you this first-hand:

HOST:document.write(location.host)

There’s nothing that can be done with that. Even saving the file locally and opening it via a file reference (e.g. “file://HD/Users/username/Desktop/map.html”) won’t do it for the same reason.

The solution I found, which is well too complicated to go into here fully, was to basically do the following:

1) Create a form with all my parameters
2) Save it to the local disk
3) Open the file in a Web Viewer

Step 4 would be either: (a) push the submit button or (b) use JavaScript to auto-submit the form.

If I can find some time, I’ll put something more detailed up.

–Mike

Any clues on how to go about this exercise? I’ve tried using the Troi URL plugin to do the POST, getting the result page source (HTML) into a field, and displaying the HTML in a web viewer using the “data URI scheme” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme – but that doesn’t work. The problem is that my Google Maps API key can’t be verified (for reasons that I can’t understand) when the page is viewed like this (though the same page works fine in a web browser).

I’m assuming that there’s a more straightforward method, based on your teaser, which wouldn’t use a plugin, but I have no idea what that method would be….?

The solution is to use the stripslashes() function (http://www.php.net/stripslashes) to convert the escaped characters.

Immediately after the line which reads:
$addrarray = $_GET[’addr’];

Add the following:
$addrarray = stripslashes($addrarray);

Note: I’ve updated the original PHP to version 1.1 to reflect this change.

You can call the correctly-formatted directly URL within a Web Viewer:
http://maps.google.com/maps?&saddr=STARTADDRESS&daddr=DESTINATIONADDRESS

Of course, this doesn’t utilize the API and you lose control over look and feel.

The other option is to investigate the Google Maps API, which does have information on getting directions:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/services.html#Driving_Directions

They have a sample page utilizing this:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/directions-simple.html

This sounds like an interesting addition. Perhaps I can address it via a future article.

More information can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

Because the Web Viewer uses the IE engine, there’s not much we can do about this limit within FileMaker. On a Mac, it uses the Safari engine which doesn’t exhibit this limitation.