Hey guys,

This looks like the place to be if you need to find out whats going on when it comes to site coding so I thought I'd drop in this rookie question here. I am playing around with the Google Maps API and the experiment I am working on uses Geocoding to get the co-ords from a place name, and then it will of course place a marker on that spot.

I've taken to it quicker then I thought but now I'm stuck on a seemingly rookie problem. I can't seem to return a value from one function to another. Here is the code snippet with the code concerned. (I have left out the other code as I don't believe its relevant with this issue)

function geocodeAddress(address) {
      if (geocoder) {
        geocoder.getLatLng(
          address,
          function(point) {
            if (!point) {
              alert(address + " not found");
            } else {
              //alert(point) ;
              return point ;
            }
          }
        );
      }
       
    }

function geocodeTest(subject) {
        
        var coords = (geocodeAddress(subject)) ;
        document.getElementById("data").innerHTML = 'Town: ' + subject + '<br />Coords: ' + coords ;
        
    }

With this code it say we run geocodeTest("London") it outputs...

Town: London
Coords: undefined

If I uncomment the alert in the geocodeAddress function it pops up the co-ordinates (52.53523, 0.200241). Thats a close guess for the example btw before anyone points out its wrong!

So its getting the co ordinates but it just won't return them into a variable in geocodeTest().

What am I doing wrong to stop this from returning. Do you need to see the whole code set?

Regards,

Leonard

variable scoping is the problem

In the code above point is being returned by a method that is local to geocodeAddress() so is NOT available once the local method has closed.

return the value from the geocodeAddress() method to the calling function

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the quick reply. I've tried a handful of things that I thought you meant but none of them seem to make a difference. I'm kind of following what your on about but its not falling into place yet.

I've tried setting a var coords before the functions and tried to feed point into that to give it to something global before it exits and that makes no difference. I've moved the return code around the function but not found a place where it will output the value of point. Am I returning wrong... the only way I can think of is return point ;. I'm used to PHP and this is melting my brain a bit. Can you offer an example of where I'm going wrong?

Cheers

Leonard

EDIT: I think I have it, I'm not 100% sure what made it start working. I think I put something in while trying to fix it that ultimately broke it, but its returning [Object, object] now which is right I think. Just need remember how to use that now!

If you could fill me in a little more on where I was going wrong it would be much appreciated

EDIT EDIT!:

OK I'm actually stumped on this one. That Object, object seems to have nothing to do with point, if I try and set it as the string "toffee" then is still comes back object Object, in fact if I remove it completely it still does the same. What do I need to be doing?

You will need to read some properties from the returned object.

Just about everything in javascript (and all OOP languages) is an object, and those objects have properties (and methods) but it will be most likely the properties that are needed.

You will probably have to look up the documentation for the API, but I would hazard a guess it will be subject.property and coords.property that you need.