Chris Searle

Having talked to the people at groundspeak (who run geocaching.com). The current development direction of the geocaching module would break the licensing of the geocaching user if they used it. It is OK to link to a cache - but not otherwise to publish information from the cache. Nor are you allowed to reverse engineer the geocaching section of the GPX file.

So - what to do instead?

What is GPX anyway?

A standard GPX file (which can be downloaded from many types of GPS) contains three main things (along with some metadata):

• Waypoints
• Routes (ordered lists of waypoints)
• Tracks

And what can we do with it?

I see several areas of interest.

1. Simple storage of data
2. Show on map (probably by using the gmap module)
3. Use with location module (perhaps a select location plugin for location that lets you select from your waypoints)

Questions

• Do we care about the metadata on the GPX file itself? Or is it simply a container for the tracks/routes/waypoints?
• Should waypoints be real nodes? This allows usage of standard drupal stuff for editing/creating/managing/tagging etc.
• Routes are lists of waypoints - how to represent to the user and allow editing? Possible again to use a custom node type
• Tracks - not sure these will be editable - probably just store and display - but how to display meaningfully - is there anything other than on a map? Perhaps download as KML for google earth?
• Views integration - would this be a good idea? Allow for tables/lists etc. Would have to learn the views api
• Location integration - again I think that this would be good but a new api to learn
• Should the integrations that require other modules be separated into sub-modules? That would allow cleaner dependency handling

I'm not too happy with the geocaching module as it stands. It doesn't do enough to be helpful. So - I've started looking at some changes in direction:

• Ability to parse GPX files
• Ability to store geocache information
• Generation of gmap macro's from the GPX data

Update:

We need to be careful to stay within the geocaching.com license. This does not permit the users to publish data from geocaching.com open to the public (from what I can see).

Parsing standard GPX is OK. Parsing the geocaching addons probably isn't. I believe that linking to geocaching.com may be acceptable - but I'm not sure.

So - I think that the next change could instead be:

• Parse standard GPX to nodes (waypoint nodes, track nodes and route nodes)
• Give the waypoint node type a found/not found status
• Allow to view the node lists for all, found, not found
• Add gmap module dependency and allow for showing maps of points

I'll have to check with geocaching.com about what they are willing to allow for linking.

Current code is in the gpx branch of http://dev.chrissearle.net/git/geocaching.git

New version (6.x-1.0) of the geocaching drupal module.

Source code on https://dev.chrissearle.net/git/geocaching.git

A module that will use a taxonomy containing geocache names (GCXXXX) or tracking (TBXXXX) and will auto-add a list of links to the node in page view linking to geocaching.com. It will also provide a filter [GCXXXX] to provide titled links from the taxonomy within a post. Still working on the docs and getting svn updates to appear here automatically.