F9 Group Marketing and Technology Blog

Back in May 2010 I wrote a three-part article series titled Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API , which showed how to build a simple store locator application using ASP.NET and the Google Maps API. The application consisted of two ASP.NET pages. In the first page, the user was prompted to enter an address, city, or postal code ( screen shot ). On postback, the user-entered address was fed into the Google Maps API’s geocoding service to determine whether the address, as entered, corresponded to known latitude and longitude coordinates. If it did, the user was redirected to the second page with the address information passed through the querystring. This page then queried the database to find nearby stores and listed them in a grid and as markers on a map ( screen shot ). Since the WebForms store locator application was published, several readers have emailed me to ask for an ASP.NET MVC version. I recently decided to port the existing WebForms application to ASP.NET MVC. This article, the first in a two-part series, walks through creating the ASP.NET MVC version of the store locator application and pinpoints some of the more interesting and challenging aspects. This article examines creating the ASP.NET MVC application and building the functionality for the user to enter an address from which to find nearby stores. Part 2 will examine how to show a grid and map of the nearby stores. Read on to learn more! Read More >

Last week’s article, Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 1) , was the first in a multi-part article series exploring how to add store locator-type functionality to your ASP.NET website using the free Google Maps API . Part 1 started with an examination of the database used to power the store locator, which contains a single table named Stores with columns capturing the store number, its address and its latitude and longitude coordinates. Next, we looked at using Google Maps API’s geocoding service to translate a user-entered address, such as San Diego, CA or 92101 into its latitude and longitude coordinates. Knowing the coordinates of the address entered by the user, we then looked at writing a SQL query to return those stores within (roughly) 15 miles of the user-entered address.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on a couple of projects that have used the free Google Maps API to add interactive maps and geocoding capabilities to ASP.NET websites. In a nutshell, the Google Maps API allow you to display maps on your website, to add markers onto the map, and to compute the latitude and longitude of an address, among many other tasks. With some Google Maps API experience under my belt, I decided it would be fun to implement a store locator feature and share it here on 4Guys. A store locator lets a visitor enter an address or postal code and then shows the nearby stores. Typically, store locators display the nearby stores on both a map and in a grid, along with the distance between the entered address and each store within the area. To see a store locator in action, check out the Wells Fargo store locator . This article is the first in a multi-part series that walks through how to add a store locator feature to your ASP.NET application. In this inaugural article, we’ll build the database table to hold the store information. Next, we’ll explore how to use the Google Maps API’s geocoding feature to allow for flexible address entry and how to translate an address into latitude and longitude pairs. Armed with the latitude and longitude coordinates, we’ll see how to retrieve nearby locations as well as how to compute the distance between the address entered by the visitor and the each nearby store. (A future installment will examine how to display a map showing the nearby stores.) Read on to learn more! Read More >

IRVINE,CA – December 28, 2008 – F9 Group, Inc. is widely known for their phone based store locator service. Recently, F9 Group, Inc. has been integrating this award winning service with the fail over option to have calls go to a live customer service agent if the caller requests it. Calls will also go [...]