Importing a route into Pocket Earth from another app

[reck]

Hello,

I use a Geocaching app on my iPhone (Geosphere) that allows you to create bookmarks. These bookmarks allow you to send parameters from Geosphere to other apps on the phone via url. By studying the syntax of the P.E. exports i’ve worked out how to transfer the location of a Geocache from Geosphere into P.E by using the longlat cords.

Now ideally what i’d like to do is transfer two sets of cords from Geosphere, my current location and the location of the geocache, into P.E. and then have P.E. create a router between these two locations.

Can P.E. accept two sets of cords and create a route from them? If so what’s syntax?

Many thanks

[reck]

Thanks to Rob Wolfe over at the Geosphere forum i’ve now got the correct syntax for passing over the details of the geocache into PE. However I still have a problem.

I’ve noticed that if someone uses the & character in their geocache description any text following the & character gets cut off and never makes it over to PE. Not sure if this is a bug or not.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

[reck]

ggggrrrrr why is this forum so full of spam?

[GeoMagik]

Yea we are being attacked by spammers, not sure why, and we already have a Captcha and 2 anti-spam plugins :/

Anyway, since Apple uses URL scheme to communicate between apps, & and some other characters are reserved and must use a special code instead:  %26 means &

If you run into any other problematic characters, this site gives the escape codes for everything.

We will look into it on our end, even though it is supposed to be considered invalid to use such characters, we may be able to make it work for most cases.

[reck]

I wasn’t sure if this problem should be resolved from the app (Geosphere) sending the variable containing the & character or the app receiving it (PE).

Would the complete description text still be within the variable at the point it arrives at PE at which point only the text up to the & is imported, or does this mean that Geosphere is only exporting the text up to & character so there’s nothing extra for PE to import?

[GeoMagik]

Most likely the entire text is being sent from Geosphere, but since & and a few other characters are reserved they should be escaped from Geosphere’s side. We can try to “work-around” it from PE but it really this is a hack and it will not be perfect.

All apps should “URL Escape” any content that they send to other apps, so really it would seem to be their bug.

[reck]

Thanks for the info. I’ve since been informed by someone on the geosphere forum that there’s a way to escape these chars. Since implementing this the text is coming in fine to PE.

[XOMTOR]

@GeoMagik

Correct, it was the URLESCAPE syntax that was missing in the Geosphere “bookmark”; a forum member there pointed it out. Like Reck mentioned, it’s working fine now so no need to implement any changes on your side.

[Author]

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