Apple Maps - selectable cities

Question

I want to create a route system with gui for my application. a route for someone, starts from city A, end in city B.

But users should be able to create their route by selecting cities which are on their road.

so i need a map format, shows only city borders and names based on users' current location.

i draw something stupid to make things more clear:

there are several ways to go to city B from city A, like:

1 - CITY A > city 1 > city 2 > LA > CITY B

2 - CITY A > city 1 > city 4 > city 3 > CITY B

3 - CITY A > city 1 > city 5 > city 3 > CITY B

So, users should be able to select cities according to their planned route. And some highlighting effect for selected cities.

Any kind of help would be great.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Here is the base logic to start:

• Get From and To locations latitude and longitude.
• Override long-press gesture event, on mapView. And place an annotation on that, also collect and store its lat-long values in one array.
• Same way allow user to do the same annotation thing for other places and store values.

Now you have three main things:

1. From Location
2. To Location
3. In-Between Locations (for example consider there are 2 user-selected pin points)

Create an route array which contains like this :

RouteArray [fromLocation, routeLocation [0], routeLocation [1], toLocation];

Now draw a shortest path for this array entities like:

• From index 0 to 1 -> FromLocation to routeLocaiton [0]
• Then index 1 to 2 -> routeLocation [0] to routeLocation [1]
• Then index 2 to 3 -> routeLocation [1] to toLocaiton

This way you can achieve your custom path drawn on map view.

In later part, think about the border thing, for that you might require to use overlay concept of Map. I guess you might find few tutorials for that.

Answer 2

You can add an annotation in the map view wherever the user taps.

So all the cities in the route will be annoted on the map.

You can draw an overlay on the map connecting all the annotations.

Hope this helps.