New download formats for POI Database

This is of interest to me, as I have spent the past couple of weeks writing a GPX editor for Garmin files. I discovered lots of strange interactions between the various GPX statements and the C510.

I downloaded a sample of the 'Federal Prisons' POI's (because they have address and phone numbers) and have documented how they are displayed on my StreetPilot C510. The bad news is that none of them actually displayed properly (or would have allowed automatic number dialing) - the good news is that it's not a big job to fix at least the .GPX version.

I am eager to know how these files interact with other than the Garmin C5xx range and I'm sure it will be to POI-Factory's benefit as well.

My samples are to be found at http://tinyurl.com/3d7g98

Thanks for the feedback, I see the GPX format will need some tweaking to make all of Garmin's models happy.

Garmin's POI Loader 2.4.0 supports auto dialing, but only from specially formatted GPX files. AFAIK, POI Loader doesn't support auto dialing from CSV files.

I had a look at your symbol handling notes and made some adjustments to POI Factory's GPX output (removed the sym tag). I'd like to get feedback for as many auto-dial models as possible.

-- SEEKING FEEDBACK --
If you have a Garmin model that supports auto dial and want to help improve the GPX download option, please report your results with the Federal Prison's file. I will keep making adjustments until it's working for all Garmin models.

JM

I've been helping Phil test his software to modify the gpx files. It makes it simple to add the gpx extenstion phone and address info to waypoints/favorites and also to POI's.

I'll give the prison file a test on my Zumo and report back.

When you use POI Loader to load a GPX file into your garmin, do the POIs show up under Custom POIs or under Favorites? I don't have my garmin with me, or I'd experiment myself. ::shrug::

-Sorry, I went slightly off topic..

Loading with the POI loader they are POI's. Opening the gpx in Mapsource, then sending it to the GPS they are favorites.

Okay, I pulled down the Federal Prisons in gpx format. I loaded it both as POI's and through Mapsource as favorites on my Zumo. I've done this with some other .gpx files and didn't see any problems, but this was different. As favorites it looked good, address and phone info were there and I could dial (didn't crank call the prison). The POI's however didn't have the extended info. Nothing, no address or phone. So, back to the pc side to look at the files. I loaded it in Phil's GeePeeEx program and it looked like the address and phone were loaded, however GeePeeEx wanted to save changes on exit, but I didn't change anything. First clue. So, I used Cooktop (an xml editor) to open it. Error, some sort of style sheet problem. So I opened again in GeePeeEx and did a save as so I had two versions. Time to compare in a plain text editor. The second line that contains the references to xml extensions is different. GeePeeEx has a ref to a garmin url that the original prison file didn't have.

So I loaded the second version onto the Zumo with POI loader. Perfect. I have address and dialable phone numbers.

So, looks like however you are creating the .gpx file needs that line to include the garmin reference.

Thanks woodbutcher -- I've made some modifications and sent file to you via email for another round of testing with your zumo.

JM

You managed to make the one change that I hadn't thought of ... or tried

It turns out (that on the C5xx range anyway), waypoints that have no symbol or a null <sym></sym> statement gets treated the same as the "Waypoint", "Pin, Red" type group -- ie it's treated quite specially.

Given that the symbol doesn't actually get displayed (at least not when viewed as a POI on the C5xx), you could probably choose almost anything (apart from the ones you've chosen so far

The difference that Rusty spotted, I think would only apply to programs that wanted to actually validate the file against its schema. I'm pretty certain that POI Loader doesn't fall into that category - my guess is, that it just reads its way through, a line at a time - judging from the constructs it objects to