View on GitHub Sample viewer app

Find places of interest near a location or within a specific area.

Image of find place

Use case

When getting directions or looking for nearby places, users may only know what the place has (“food”), the type of place (“gym”), or the generic place name (“Starbucks”), rather than the specific address. You can get suggestions and locations for these places of interest (POIs) using a natural language query. Additionally, you can filter the results to a specific area.

How to use the sample

Choose a type of place in the first field and an area to search within in the second field. Click the “Search” button to show the results of the query on the map. Click on a result pin to show its name and address. If you pan away from the result area, the “Redo search in this area” button at the bottom of the screen will become active. Click it to query again for the currently viewed area on the map.

How it works

  1. Create a LocatorTask using a URL to a locator service.
  2. Find the location for an address (or city name) to build an envelope to search within:
    • Create GeocodeParameters.
    • Add return fields to the parameters’ resultAttributeNames collection. Only add a single ”*” option to return all fields.
    • Call locatorTask.geocodeAsync(locationQueryString, geocodeParameters) to get a list of GeocodeResults.
    • Use getDisplayLocation from each of the results to build an Envelope to view.
  3. Get place of interest (POI) suggestions based on a place name query:
    • Create SuggestParameters.
    • Add “POI” to the parameters’ categories collection with getCategories().add("POI").
    • Call locatorTask.suggestAsync(placeQueryString, suggestParameters) to get a list of SuggestResults.
    • The SuggestResult will have a label to display in the search suggestions list.
  4. Use one of the suggestions or a user-written query to find the locations of POIs:
    • Create GeocodeParameters.
    • Set the parameters’ search area to the envelope.
    • Call locatorTask.geocodeAsync(suggestionLabelOrPlaceQueryString, geocodeParameters) to get a list of GeocodeResults.
    • Display the places of interest using the results’ displayLocations.

Relevant API

  • GeocodeParameters
  • GeocodeResult
  • LocatorTask
  • SuggestParameters
  • SuggestResult

Additional information

This sample uses the World Geocoding Service. For more information, see the Geocoding service help topic on the ArcGIS Developer website.

Tags

businesses, geocode, locations, locator, places of interest, POI, point of interest, search, suggestions

Sample Code

module-info.java module-info.java FindPlaceController.java FindPlaceSample.java
/*
* Copyright 2022 Esri.
*
* Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
* you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
* You may obtain a copy of the License at
*
* http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
*
* Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
* distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
* WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
* See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
* limitations under the License.
*/
module com.esri.samples.find_place {
// require ArcGIS Maps SDK for Java module
requires com.esri.arcgisruntime;
// handle SLF4J http://www.slf4j.org/codes.html#StaticLoggerBinder
requires org.slf4j.nop;
// require JavaFX modules that the application uses
requires javafx.graphics;
requires javafx.controls;
requires javafx.fxml;
// make all @FXML annotated objects reflectively accessible to the javafx.fxml module
opens com.esri.samples.find_place to javafx.fxml;
exports com.esri.samples.find_place;
}