Plot postal codes provided in ranges.

Question

Plot postal codes provided in ranges.

Balasaheb Molawade 136

Hi,

We are currently using Bing Maps and have received a requirement from our customers to plot postal codes on the map. However, instead of providing individual postal codes, they will provide in a range format, such as 21070–21199.

The requirement is to plot all postal codes that fall within the specified range. We would like to know if there is any way in Bing Maps to achieve this functionality — i.e., to plot all postal codes within a given range like 21070–21199.

We look forward to your response.

2 answers

Your answer

Answer 1

IoTGirl 3,696 Microsoft Employee Moderator

Hi @Balasaheb Molawade

This seems like a duplicate of https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2287515/fetching-multiple-boundaries-using-the-bing-maps-a where you were told that you will have to loop through the various individual Zip codes to pull back the polygons. If not, can you please add clarity as to the difference in this question?

Sincerely,

IoTGirl

Answer 2

rbrundritt 20,931 Microsoft Employee Moderator

With Bing Maps, as IoTGirl recommended, you could fetch multiple boundaries from the REST API's, however, there are likely a lot of zip codes that don't exist in the range you specific and thus will fail. If the range is small (a couple under values), this might not be too difficult to work handle.

That said, this is a great scenario for using vector tiles, which Azure Maps supports natively, but Bing Maps doesn't. Even more so if you leverage PMTiles as you wouldn't even need a custom REST service to make the tiles available. This scenario could be achieved in Azure Maps with less than a couple dozen lines of code and would be extremely low cost. I actually threw an Azure Maps sample of this together in about 10 minutes. You can try it here: https://rbrundritt.azurewebsites.net/Demos/AzureMaps/PMTiles/FilteredZTCA.html
It would be fairly easy to extend this sample to support swapping between different data layers and supporting filtering on them, or even overlaying and filtering multiple data layers. This sample is using a simple PMTile file as a data source, which is a static file which is very cheap to host. The serving costs of a million tiles from this would be a couple of dollars.
If I tried to get the above solution to work in Bing Maps, it would take several thousand lines of cod, and likely require doing unsupported things to create a custom data layer to render the PMTiles as vector tiles.

I know you are using Bing Maps, but you have asked a lot of questions on here where Azure Maps would have been a lot easier and likely still would be. The basic version of Bing Maps was just retired the other day. So it would be good to start making your plans for making the transition. Is there any specific technical reason/limitation in Azure Maps that might be preventing this? Knowing these now will give the team a chance to look into them to ensure a smoother transition for you in the future.

Balasaheb Molawade 136 Reputation points

2025-07-09T13:07:21.41+00:00

Hi Ricky,

Thank you for your response.

We have already initiated the transition to Azure Maps, and it may take some additional time to complete. However, in the meantime, we would like to continue using this functionality with the current Bing Maps version.

Please let us know if this is feasible or if any adjustments are required.

Thanks!
rbrundritt 20,931 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2025-07-09T18:41:09.3466667+00:00
If you are only going to load a few hundred zip code boundaries at a time, these boundaries are simple enough you could load them directly to the map. The difficult part would be getting the boundaries as the total size of all the data is decently large. A slimmed down GeoJSON file is over 150MB, so loading this directly into your app is not a good option. A couple of approaches:

Get a list of all valid zip codes that have an area (e.g. not PO Box zip codes which are points). Then your filter on this list, then take the filtered list and use the geodata API to retrieve the boundaries.

Create a database of all zip code areas (Zip code tabulation ZCTA areas are a good starting point). Create a web service to query this database and then load the data in the map. The Bing Spatial Data Services may be an option to help make things easier, however I've been having issues uploading any of the ZCTA data I have come across due to its size.

I took a quick try at the first approach and created a list of zip codes that have area's using ZCTA data using the following code to get a filtered list. The list itself is about 270KB, so not too difficult to load directly into your web app. However, the code made the comment too big, so I'll post it as another answer.
rbrundritt 20,931 Reputation points Microsoft Employee Moderator

2025-07-09T19:26:10.5366667+00:00
Update, the forums still wouldn't let me add the code for some reason (too big?). Here is the basic idea:

//A list of valid zip code values. var zcta = ['00601', '00602',....'99929']; //Specify search range. var minZip = 21070; var maxZip = 21199; //Find values with in the search range. var filteredZips = zcta.filter(zip => parseInt(zip) >= minZip && parseInt(zip) <= maxZip)

Once the data is loaded the filtering works pretty fast. This filter returned 42 zip codes which is less than the 129 possible values between 21070 and 21199. So, this would be much faster than trying all possible values and less error prone. From here, you can simply use the GeoData API. This is not nearly as efficient as using the Azure Maps solution but is functional.

I've managed to get a Bing Maps version of this solution working here: https://rbrundritt.azurewebsites.net/Demos/BingMaps/BingZctaFilter.html It work fine when there is not more than a couple hundred possible zip codes.
Balasaheb Molawade 136 Reputation points

2025-07-10T13:05:13.56+00:00

Hi Ricky,

Thank you for your response—we truly appreciate it.

We will review the details.

Thanks!

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Plot postal codes provided in ranges.

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