geocsv

A wee tool to show comma-separated value data on a map.

Other variants

This is a little project I've played about with, and there are now three variants:

1. geocsv is a fairly heavyweight web-app with both client-side and serverside components. It was the first version, and is the only version which meets the original requirement of being able to present data from Google Sheets, but it's a remarkably heavyweight solution to what should be a simple problem.
2. geocsv-lite is a much lighter, client-side only reworking of the problem, in ClojureScript. I still wasn't satisfied that this was light enough.
3. geocsv-js is a reworking in native JavaScript without any frameworks or heave libraries, except Leaflet. It is vastly lighter, and probably the one to use in most applications.

Overview

The CSV file must have

• column names in the first row;
• data in all other rows;
• a column whose name is name, which always contains data;
• a column whose name is latitude, whose value is always a number between -90.0 and 90.0;
• a column whose name is longitude, whose value is always a number between -180.0 and 180.90

Additionally, the value of the column category, if present, will be used to select map pins from the map pins folder, if a suitable pin is present. Thus is the value of category is foo, a map pin image with the name Foo-pin.png will be selected.

Passing CSV files to the app

### Loading them onto the server

If you run the server running geocsv, the simplest way to add CSV files is simply to copy them into the directory resourcs/data. The default file is the one named data.csv, which is the one that will be served if nothing else is specified. Other files can be specifiec by appending ?file=filename to the URL; so if the URL of your geocsv service is

https://geocsv.example.com/

and the file you want to view is myfile.csv, then you would specify this as the value of file in the query part of the URL.

https://geocsv.example.com/?file=myfile.csv

Loading CSV file onto another public server

If you're not running the geocsv server yourself, you can upload the CSV to another server which is accessible by the geocsv server. You can then map data from the CSV file by specifying the URL of the file as the value of uri in the query part of the URL:

https://geocsv.example.com/?uri=http://my.other.server/path/to/myfile.csv

Using a Google spreadsheet

If you use Google Sheets, then every sheet has a 'document id', a long string of characters which uniquely identifies that sheet. Suppose your Google spreadsheet has a document id of abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-12345, then you could pull data from this spreadsheet by specifying this as the value of docid in the query part of the URL:

https://geocsv.example.com/?docid=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-12345

The spreadsheet must be publicly readable.

Precedence

Nothing, of course, stops you from specifying multiple arguments in the query part of the URL, but only one will be used. The precedence is in this order:

1. docid is considered first, and overrides anything else;
2. uri is considered next, and overrides file;
3. the value of file is considered only if neither of the other two are present.

Not yet working

geocsv is at an early stage of development, and some features are not yet working.

Missing map pin images

At the current stage of development, if no appropriate image exists in the resources/public/img/map-pins folder, that's your problem. See issue #4. If you fancy adding some more, I'll happily accept a pull request.

Prerequisites

You will need Leiningen 2.0 or above installed.

Running

To start a web server for the application, run:

lein npm install
lein run

License

Copyright © 2020 Simon Brooke

Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or (at your option) any later version.

NOTE THAT files which are directly created by the Luminus template do not currently have a GPL header at the top; files which are new in this project or which have been substantially modified for this project should have a GPL header at the top.