Tuesday 19 February 2008

Linking Toucan Navigate and Zoho Creator

I have been reviewing Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com) recently and decided to create a quick prototype to illustrate how it could be used with our Toucan mapping tool to do something useful.

Here's a simple scenario taken from my college studies in Urban Planning - looking at the relationship between the location of Fast Food Franchises and major highways. My main objective was to accomplish this without a single line of code (no html, no javascript, no nothing) and yet provide enough functionality to answer some basic questions, hence making this potentially useful in the business world.

Specifically, I wanted to:

  1. Have more than one person enter,update or view Franchise data (i.e. collaborate)
  2. Dynamically filter the data (by Franchise or by State).
  3. Display thousands of records on a map.

In less than ten minutes I assembled this (I did have the data). The form below is used to capture data.

The ZC View is used to filter the data by Franchise or by State and to save the Filtered or all the (aprox. 20,000 records) and save them as .csv file (needed by Toucan Navigate).



Toucan Navigate is used to display all or a partial list (i.e. filtered) of the records stored and maintained in ZC.



So here it is - a map clearly showing the concentration of Fast Food Places along the I-95 corridor.

You can check the ZC app here: Fast Food Tracker

And download a trial (full feature) version of Toucan Navigate.

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