Live Google Maps for Meteor

meteor add singlow:live-maps

This package allows you to turn any cursor into a set of live markers on a google map canvas.

Example

liveMarkers = LiveMaps.addMarkersToMap(
  googleMapObject,
  [ {
    cursor: Places.find(),
    onClick: function() {
      console.log('Document id = ' + this.id);
    },
    transform: function(document) {
      return {
        title: document.firstName + ' ' + document.lastName,
        position: new google.maps.LatLng(document.address.location[1], document.address.location[0]),
        animation: google.maps.Animation.BOUNCE,
        icon: '//cdn.mydomain.com/icons/icon-house.png'
      };
    }
  } ]
);

Use the addMarkersToMap function in your template's rendered function after creating the map. This may actually be inside of a google maps init function within the rendered function.

The markers options should be an object or array of objects specifying a cursor and a transform function that will generate the arguments to the google.maps.Marker constructor. If no transform is provided, a default transform function will look for several possible sources of a title and a latitude and longitude and optionally an icon and animation property.

The default transformation will look for top level properties called lat, latitude, lon, lng, or longitude, or an array called location with a pair of values [longitude, latitude]. The array version is compatible with mongo geospatial indexes. It will also look for properties name, title or label to populate the marker title. So if your collection has these properties already, you don't need a transform unless you need to customize another property of the marker.

The function will return an object with a stop method that will tear down the LiveQueries generated by the observations. Call it on your template destroyed method. You may need to declare the variable in your file scope to make sure it is available in both the rendered and destroyed functions.

This package expects google maps to be loaded when it is used, but it does not require any particular package to provide it. It may be provided by another package or included directly in your app as long as the expected google namespace is available globally. There is an atmosphere package called mrt:googlemaps that will include the api for you.