Use PHP, MySql and Google Map API v3 for displaying data on map

By jhnidk | October 12, 2010 | Mapping, MySQL, PHP | 51 Comments inShare1

Displaying data on maps can be useful in many situations. By integrating tools like PHP, MySQL and Google Maps, you can relatively easy build customized maps for your website or blog. In this post well take a closer look on the possibilities, and build a interactive map based on PHP, MySql and Google Map API v3. To see what were building, see live example here

Geocoded data
The script in this post uses MySQL for storing the data thats going to be displayed on the map. This method works fine if youre adding multiple points to your map (10+), and want a dynamic way to retrieve data data. If youre going to display less than 10 Points the solution in this post is a little overkill. Before proceeding, you need some geocoded data (data that contains lat/long information) to display on the map. If you dont have geocoded data, you can find a post here, where you can learn how to geocode addresses for usage on eg. Google Maps. You can use the following test data for this example:
01 CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `poi_example` ( 02 `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, 03 `name` text NOT NULL, 04 `desc` text NOT NULL, 05 `lat` text NOT NULL, 06 `lon` text NOT NULL, 07 PRIMARY KEY (`id`) 08 ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=7 ; 09 10 -11 -- Data dump for the table `poi_example` 12 -13 14 INSERT INTO `poi_example` (`id`, `name`, `desc`, `lat`, `lon`) VALUES

(1, '100 Club', 'Oxford Street, London W1<br/>3 Nov 2010 : Buster Shuffle<br/>', '51.514980', '-0.144328'), (2, '93 Feet East', '150 Brick Lane, London E1 6RU<br/>7 Dec 16 2010 : Jenny & Johnny<br/>', '51.521710', '-0.071737'), 15 (3, 'Adelphi Theatre', 'The Strand, London WC2E 7NA<br/>11 Oct 2010 : Love Never Dies', '51.511010', '-0.120140'), (4, 'Albany, The', '240 Gt. Portland Street, London W1W 5QU', 18 '51.521620', '-0.143394'), 17 (5, 'Aldwych Theatre', 'Aldwych, London WC2B 4DF<br/>11 Oct 2010 : Dirty Dancing', '51.513170', '-0.117503'), (6, 'Alexandra Palace', 'Wood Green, London N22<br/>30 Oct 20 2010 : Lynx All-Nighter', '51.596490', '-0.109514'); 19

When you have a MySQL database with Geocoded content youre ready to proceed.

Extracting from MySQL

Next thing is to create a small piece of PHP that can connect and extract data from MySQL
01 // connection to mysql 02 03 <? 04 $dbname 05 $dbuser 06 $dbpass 07 $dbserver 08 09 $dbcnx = mysql_connect ("$dbserver", "$dbuser", "$dbpass"); 10 mysql_select_db("$dbname") or die(mysql_error()); 11 ?> 12 13 // extracting and looping through data 14 15 <? 16 $query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM poi_example"); 17 while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){ 18 $name=$row['name']; 19 $lat=$row['lat']; 20 $lon=$row['lon']; 21 $desc=$row['desc']; 22 echo ("addMarker($lat, $lon,'<b>$name</b><br/>$desc');\n"); 23 } 24 ?> ='<database name>'; //Name of the database ='<database username>'; //Username for the db ='<database password>'; //Password for the db ='<database server>'; //Name of the mysql server

As you can see, the output of the script is has the following format: addMarker(lat, long, marker data);, this is the marker format that you can use for adding multiple markers fir Google Maps API V3.

Google Maps API V3

Next thing is to embed the PHP code into the javascript required for displaying multiple infowindows in Google Map API V3. For this example, we have used the code from August LI as inspiration. The script has the following features:

var icon: specifies a customizable icon. In this example a icon from Google is used, but you can add your own icons as well var popup: specifies the maximum width of the info window. In this case 300 pixels addMarker: contains latitude and longitude of the points, and a possibility to display whatever HTML content you like in the info window that corresponds to each point. In this example were just displaying a headline and description The map automatically zooms and centers to the most detailed view where all the map markers can be displayed in the same map. This is automatically calculated based on the size of the map, and the locations of the map markers.

The most important limit of this script is, that this technique is primarily useful to display a limited amount of map markers (below 100). If youre going to display more points, you should consider a marker cluster solution. The final script with the PHP and javascript code merged looks like this:
01 <? $dbname 02 database 03 $dbuser 04 $dbpass 05 06 07 $dbcnx = mysql_connect ("$dbserver", "$dbuser", "$dbpass"); 08 mysql_select_db("$dbname") or die(mysql_error()); 09 ?> 10 <html> 11 <head> 12 <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/> 13 <title>Google Map API V3 with markers</title> 14 <style type="text/css"> 15 body { font: normal 10pt Helvetica, Arial; } 16 #map { width: 350px; height: 300px; border: 0px; padding: 0px; } 17 </style>

='insert mysql database name'; //Name of the ='insert mysql user name'; //Username for the db ='insert mysql password'; //Password for the db

$dbserver ='insert mysql database server address'; //Name of the mysql server

18

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps/api/js?v=3&sensor=false" type="text/javascript"></script>

19 <script type="text/javascript"> 20 //Sample code written by August Li var icon = new 2 google.maps.MarkerImage("http://maps.google.com/mapfiles/ms/micons/b 1 lue.png", 22 new google.maps.Size(32, 32), new google.maps.Point(0, 0), 23 new google.maps.Point(16, 32)); 24 var center = null; 25 var map = null; 26 var currentPopup; 27 var bounds = new google.maps.LatLngBounds(); 28 function addMarker(lat, lng, info) { 29 var pt = new google.maps.LatLng(lat, lng); 30 bounds.extend(pt); 31 var marker = new google.maps.Marker({ 32 position: pt, 33 icon: icon, 34 map: map 35 }); 36 var popup = new google.maps.InfoWindow({ 37 content: info, 38 maxWidth: 300 39 }); 40 google.maps.event.addListener(marker, "click", function() { 41 if (currentPopup != null) { 42 currentPopup.close(); 43 currentPopup = null; 44 } 45 popup.open(map, marker); 46 currentPopup = popup; 47 }); 48 google.maps.event.addListener(popup, "closeclick", function() { 49 map.panTo(center); 50 currentPopup = null; 51 }); 52 } 53 function initMap() { 54 map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map"), { 55 center: new google.maps.LatLng(0, 0), 56 zoom: 14, 57 mapTypeId: google.maps.MapTypeId.ROADMAP, 58 mapTypeControl: false, 59 mapTypeControlOptions: { 60 style: google.maps.MapTypeControlStyle.HORIZONTAL_BAR 61 },

62 navigationControl: true, 63 navigationControlOptions: { 64 style: google.maps.NavigationControlStyle.SMALL 65 } 66 }); 67 <? 68 $query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM poi_example"); 69 while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){ 70 $name=$row['name']; 71 $lat=$row['lat']; 72 $lon=$row['lon']; 73 $desc=$row['desc']; 74 echo ("addMarker($lat, $lon,'<b>$name</b><br/>$desc');\n"); 75 } 76 ?> 77 center = bounds.getCenter(); 78 map.fitBounds(bounds); 79 80 } 81 </script> 82 </head> <body onload="initMap()" style="margin:0px; border:0px; padding:0px;"> 84 <div id="map"></div> 83 85 </html>

The final result looks like this:

See live example here

Conclusion
With the sample data and scripts in this post, you can easily get started working with multiple map markers on Google Map API V3. As mentioned earlier, the only limit in this script is that if performs best with < 100 markers at the same time.