Location Services

Hi All,

Trying to upload a map update using maps API. I can get the map to upload but in the Editor it doesn't display anything.

It looks like what shows in the Editor is in the "Public_url" variable, however, what uploads gets stored in "unformatted_public_url". 

How do you get it to display properly, or am I missing a step?

Uploading your own SVG maps in Meridian is not supported. Maps should be created and converted by the Meridian Professional Services Team as there is a lot of meta-data in the file that is required to show the maps properly. When your maps are converted, they are uploaded for you as part of the process. 

Hi Herman,

My name is Shawn Kilburn and I am the Meridian team's technical writer.

It's not strictly true that we don't support customer map uploading. We do actually support this.

However, it is true that we gently encourage people to work with our Maps team to create Meridain maps, because creating a valid SVG Meridian map can be quite tricky.

Typically, if someone is creating a new map, we very strongly encourage people to contact our Maps team for assistance with this. You can reach them at hpe-aruba-meridian-poc@hpe.com. 

For editing maps, we recommend that people download the map SVG file from the Editor and use that file. We also encourage people to use Adobe Illustrator, if possible, because we know that it works with our SVG formatting.

There are two ways to upload maps:

1) The Meridian admins can enable the Map uploading UI in the Meridian Editor.

2) Using the Maps API endpoint.

One thing to note about the Maps API endpoint is that the SVG validator is quite strict and it's quite easy to make a change to an SVG map that invalidates the map and prevents the map from being uploaded with the API. 

To bypass the validator, append this to your API call:

?suppress_svg_errors=True

You can read more about Meridian mapping in these help articles:

http://docs.meridianapps.com/article/309-creating-meridian-maps

http://docs.meridianapps.com/article/484-using-the-maps-api

http://docs.meridianapps.com/article/363-map-layer-styling

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know.

Cheers,

Shawn

Hi Shawn,

Thank you for highlighting the optional "?suppress_svg_errors=True" again in your post. It's also mentioned in the API docs at http://docs.meridianapps.com/developers/editor_mapsapi, but it's easy to miss there.

We've had good assistance from the POC team in adding our first map. However, for a full deployment, we'd want to do all map manipulation through the API.

Based on your post and the API docs, I managed to upload SVGs for a few extra floors to our POC setup.

Is there any additional API documentation that you're aware of? The docs on the URL I just mentioned are pretty terse; I'd like to automate all map processing, so including the georeferencing of maps (ie programmatically update the gps_ref_points field for each uploaded map, using the REST API). I did some trial&error attempts with HTTP PATCH and HTTP PUT calls, but all variations that I tried resulted in a 400/Bad Request response.

As a technical writer, I'm sure you'll have the best overview of what docs are available and where :-)

Thanks in advance and my apologies if I'm stealing the thread too much with this question.

Cheers,

Jeroen

Hi all,

FWIW: later today I did manage to update the GPS reference points on the map. User @sreitsma pointed me in the right direction, outside of this forum; the "interactive" / clickable side of the API gave more details and led me to conclude that my cURL calls with PUT and PATCH methods had the wrong Content-Type header (should be "application/json"). Maybe this addition is of use to someone else later...

Still looking for a more complete API reference though :-)

- Jeroen

Hi Jeroen,

Thanks for your question! I'm happy that you were able to figure out some of this stuff on your own. I have to warn you though that any undocumented uses of the API may be subject to change.

All of the supported APIs are currently documented because anything not documented is still in active development. In other words, you've already seen the complete API reference documentation.

If you have any other undocumented API questions, I'm happy to help you work through them with the understanding that we'll be walking on quicksand.

Cheers,

Shawn