MapViewer - A team of newbies and definitely basic questions...

Question

Dear All,
We are a team of programmers who are very new to MapViewer. We are an experienced team of GIS programmers, however, we find difficulty in applying known functions to MapViewer. It's a great application, but a lot of unknowns.
We have very basic questions, as well as advanced ones. I would like to summarize them as follows:
1. How can I let the map to be zoomed into a specific feature?
2. How can I execute a query to find a specific feature?
3. How can I execute network analysis query to find the shortest path or paths between two or more nodes?
4. How can I find out the nearest node to the location when user clicks on an arbitrary location on the map?
5. How can I execute generic queries, without (this is important) need to send/receive XML queries?
6. The bottomline is: we just want to use ready made functions to make it as easy as possible.
Anyhelp is greatly appreciated. We are stuck with the basics of MapViewer (Oracle Maps).
Please help us find the light :)
Best regards.
Desperate MapViewer Team!

Answer 1

Here are some quick answers, hopefully they are not too late.
1. You will construct a theme (mostly a dynamic one) that contains the specific feature, then call the theme's setBoundingTheme(true). Typically what we see people do is: a) create a dynamic theme with a query that selects a set of features; b) create a FOI layer based on the theme (MVThemeBasedFOI); c) call the setBoundingTheme(true) on the FOI layer. The end result, is that MapViewer will process your query and return the FOI data to the Oracle Maps JavaScript client, which will zoom the map to include the set of features in the FOI layer. Check out Oracle Maps tutorial #35 for an example.
2. This is partly answered above. Basically you will construct a theme with a dynamic query string. You may want to check out tutorial #37 which finds out and displays the buffers around a set of points; the buffers are constructed via a SQL query at run time.
3. This is not really a MapViewer question; rather, you may need to consult the Oracle Spatial routing engine XML API; the gist is you send the XML route request to the routing server, which returns a set of coordinates for your directions, which you can construct (MapViewer) FOI objects out of and display them on the map.
4. I'm not sure our routing engine or network data model API has such a function ready for use; what you can do is if you can formulate the SQL query string (with the current location represented as a binding variable), then you can create a theme out of this query condition, and simply supply the location at run time to get the set of nodes.
5. Can you please elaborate on what do you mean by generic queries? A simple usage scenario will help.
6. We understand; there are quite a lot of things that can be made easier out of the box and we are working towards that. in the mean time, just ask questions if you have them; and always check out the Oracle maps tutorials first (actually reading the MapViewer primer article should be the absolute first step :) ).
thanks
LJ