Fwd: ProTip for working with LDS Maps

[AJ ONeal (Home)]

A few ProTips (TM) for anyone wanting to use the LDS Maps.

These are the urls:

https://www.lds.org/maps/services/search?query={{name or id}}&lang=eng

https://www.lds.org/maps/services/layers/details?id={{id}}&layer={{mandatory type}}@&lang=eng

Here's the catch(es):

Even if you know the id of the unit, you can't directly request it on the details url because the layer parameter is mandatory and it could be 'ward.ysa' or 'ward.tongan' or just 'ward' or 'stake'.

So you have to query first. However, the more specific you are, the less accurate it becomes.

I was searching "Provo YSA 19th Stake 1940120" and it was giving me everything but the stake I wanted. That was frustrating...

If you just search by id, such as 1940120, then you'll also get street addresses and zip codes and such (particularly problematic with lower number id stakes and wards).

So what I did was include only the first word of the name of the stake "Provo", in this case, plus the unit number, 1940120 in this case, and that gave me exactly one result.

Then I looped through the results to match on the id. The trick here is that you need to id.toString() because if you try to match a unitNo from another part of the API with the id from maps you'll be comparing a number against a string and it may not work out...

AJ ONeal