Lindsey Felton, GIS AnalystJeremy Coulson, Webmaster

Frederick County, VA

Concept and Early Dev

• What we had: the printed book.• What was asked: a digital book.

• Page County for inspiration.• Chief problem: A mobile solution with no

dependence on server technology, network connection, or OS capabilities.

Why No Network?

Map Creation• Data driven pages in

ArcMap.

Map Creation

• Python script to export those maps to JPEGs.• Concern: Creating one HTML page for each

map – 400+ maps! – is laborious and would make updates difficult.

JavaScript to Select Images

• Instead of one page for each image, we can use one page that loads any image requested.

• Vastly simplifies updates and maintenance.• Example: link points to jpeg.html?s=map300.

JavaScript to Select Images

Street Indexes

• To find a street by its name, we provide a list of streets with links to map book pages.

• VB formats table inExcel to be saved asCSV.

Street Indexes

• Python script reads CSV and writes out a big HTML table.

Street Indexes• The result is a table that loads in the browser

with no need for server tech or network.

First Version Delivered• We had built what we set out to build: a digital

version of the printed map book.• We sent it to the fire chiefs and they seemed

to have one overarching common desire: an address search.

Address Search Sans Server

• An address search with ASP.NET/SQL Server, PHP/MySQL, etc. would have been simple and quick. We had to remain independent of a server or network connection.

• We tried jQuery plugins, HTML5 web storage, and other ideas that were all too complex or slow.

• Final solution: a simple (and very long) JavaScript associative array.

Address Search Sans Server

• Again, we turned to Python to automate data processing and write our array.

Address Search Sans Server

• The array associates each address with a page number.

Address Search Sans Server

• Browsers on mobile devices process the resulting 1.2 MB JS file quickly.

Second Version Delivered

• New requests for functionality are taking us far beyond a simple digital version of a printed reference to a true navigational tool.

• Directions, interactive map images, etc.• How to get data without

network?• How to detect network

serve content conditionally?

Resources

• Mapbook open source on GitHub: https://github.com/mrcoulson/Emergency-Responders-Mapbook

• Python download: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.2.3/