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Uploading a Data Source Using the CSS

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IMPORTANT: MapPoint Web Service was retired on November 18, 2011. Please see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd877180.aspx for a list of current Bing Maps APIs.

You upload new data sources from the Bing Maps Customer Services site (CSS) Home page, which contains sections for data sources in both the production and staging environments. You can run a maximum of 50 data jobs within a 24-hour period. Data jobs include uploading new location or polygon data sources, replacing existing data sources, and creating downloadable location data source files. You can have a maximum of 25 data sources on the MapPoint Web Service servers at a time.

Location data source files that you upload to MapPoint must be in either Microsoft Office Access XML file format or flat-file format and must meet specific requirements. For more information, see Requirements for Location Data Sources.

Although you cannot create polygon data source files with Access, the files must be in an XML file format that conforms to Microsoft Access XML. For more information, see Formatting a Polygon Data Source and Requirements for Polygon Data Sources.

To upload a new data source

  1. On the Home page, scroll down to the data sources section for the environment that you want, and then click Create.

  2. Choose the geometry type for the data source by selecting either Point or Polygon.

  3. (Optional.) For data sources containing point (location) data, choose a geocoding level from the Geocoding level (matched method) list. If the Latitude and Longitude columns in the data source file are empty for any of the entities, the entities will be geocoded as part of the upload process. The geocoder works through the geocoding hierarchy in the order shown in the list (Street, PostCode, City, Subdivision, CountryRegion), seeking a match for each entity either below or at the level you select. The default geocoding level is City.

  4. (Optional.) Sometimes the geocoder returns multiple results for an address. Select the Reject ambiguous matches check box to leave the Latitude and Longitude fields blank for any entity for which multiple matches are returned. Otherwise, the latitude and longitude coordinates for the first match are used.

  5. In Data source name, type a name for the new data source. The name you type is appended to the customer name and account ID assigned to you by MapPoint, which is displayed to the left of the box. For example, for a company called Fourth Coffee Company, the customer name might be FourthCoffee, the account ID might be 310, and the data source names might be FourthCoffee.310.espresso, Fourth Coffee.310.restaurants, and so on.

  6. In Entity type, assign an entity type for the data source. The entities in a data source require an entity type and all entities within the data source must be of the same type. The entity type is the category that you want to associate with your data, such as Stores, Distributors, or Territories. The name for an entity type must be XML-compliant—it cannot contain spaces or reserved characters. For example, the Fourth Coffee Company might use Espresso_stands as an entity type, to group all walk-up espresso stands in one data source. Entities in another data source might be Cafes and include locations that have tables for customers.

  7. Type the file name and path of the data file, or click Browse to locate the file on your computer.

  8. Click Create.

Tip

Give your data source file a logical name that describes its contents and relates to the name you give the data source on the MapPoint servers. For example, if your data source file contains street addresses for your company's stores, name the file something like WingtipToysStores.xml.

Note

  • If your data source file does not include a Country/region column that contains values, the geocoder uses the MapPoint.World data source for geocoding and cannot return street-level matches.

  • File names cannot contain the following characters (the path can contain the slash ( / ) character, but the actual file name cannot): \ / : * ? “ < > | ” ' % ; ? ) ( & +

The Home page includes a section for Recent jobs. Refresh the page to see the status of your upload job. Click View details to see additional information, such as the number of records that were successfully uploaded, why records that were not successfully uploaded were skipped, and other information.

Important

If you modify a location data source by using the tools on the CSS, you should download the data source file and then update your local copy of the file. Otherwise, your changes will be lost the next time that you upload the data source.

See Also

Concepts

Deleting a Data Source (MapPoint)
Job Status
Replacing a Data Source
Uploading a Data Source Using the Command Line
What is Geocoding?