[Editor’s note: Tutorial for using the vanrikom classes to read in shapefiles in Flash and Flex AS3 and display them on a Google Maps mashup.]
Republished from the Box Shaped World blog. 28 April 2009.
I’m working an Adobe AIR application and I wanted to be able to have the user select a shapefile, and then parse it to create a KML file. I didn’t want to have the user be responsible for creating a KML file. I thought I might try and crack the shapefile enigma since it is a well documented format, but that would have taken time and I suddenly realized I’m not actually a developer :). Instead, I found this set of Actionscript Classes to parse a shapefile in Flash. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a very good tutorial on how to work with the classes. The example is a little confusing (at least for me) and also uses a far file. I’d never heard of far compressed files. So I took the classes and created my own parser. I thought I would post a tutorial on how to use these shapefile classes in conjunction with AIR and the Google Maps API for flash. This technique would work with flex as well, I just didn’t want to have to write the code to upload a file. I presume a few things with this. The shapefile you are using for this should already have a geographic projection (e.g. latitude and longitude Geographic NAD 83). In order to use the Google Maps API with AIR, you need a URL with a key associated with it. Below are two zipfiles available for download. The testfile.zip is the shapefile I was using. The vanrikom.zip is the downloaded actionscript classes from the Google Code repository. I had trouble downloading the using an svn so I did it manually. I’ll save you the time by making it available here…unless the original author asks me to remove them. There are parts that I find confusing with the way the reader was set up. For some reason polyline inherits from polygon. Intuitively to me it should be the other way around…but like I said, I’m not a developer.
This was all done using FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK 3. There are 4 custom classes in addition to the mxml file. Each are shown here.