About search your address on MKMapView.

When you have address it's a string, how to get geocoding ?

 

In ios5 ago, use google service.

 

 

As was mentioned before, the best thing to do is to use the Google Maps API, it supports a lot of formats but for several reasons I chose to go with JSON.

So here are the steps to perform a JSON query to Google Maps and obtain the coordinate of the query. Note that not all the correct validations are done, this is only a Proof of concept.

1) Download a JSON framework/library for the iPhone, there are several, I chose to go with this one, it's very good and seems an active project, plus several comercial applications seem to be using it. So add it to your project ( instructions here ).

2) To query Google Maps for an address we need to build a request URL like this:http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=Paris+France

This url, will return a JSON object for the query "Paris+France".

 

3)Code:

 

 

//Method to handle the UISearchBar "Search", 
- (void) searchBarSearchButtonClicked:(UISearchBar *)theSearchBar 
{
    //Perform the JSON query.
    [self searchCoordinatesForAddress:[searchBar text]];

    //Hide the keyboard.
    [searchBar resignFirstResponder];
}

 

 

After we handle the UISearchBar search, we must make the request to Google Maps:

 

 

- (void) searchCoordinatesForAddress:(NSString *)inAddress
{
    //Build the string to Query Google Maps.
    NSMutableString *urlString = [NSMutableString stringWithFormat:@"http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=%@?output=json",inAddress];

    //Replace Spaces with a '+' character.
    [urlString setString:[urlString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@"+"]];

    //Create NSURL string from a formate URL string.
    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];

    //Setup and start an async download.
    //Note that we should test for reachability!.
    NSURLRequest *request = [[NSURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:url];
    NSURLConnection *connection = [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self];

    [connection release];
    [request release];
}

 

 

We must of course then handle the response of the GoogleMaps server ( Note: a lot of validations missing)

 

//It's called when the results of [[NSURLConnection alloc] initWithRequest:request delegate:self] come back.
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data 
{   
    //The string received from google's servers
    NSString *jsonString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:data encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

    //JSON Framework magic to obtain a dictionary from the jsonString.
    NSDictionary *results = [jsonString JSONValue];

    //Now we need to obtain our coordinates
    NSArray *placemark  = [results objectForKey:@"Placemark"];
    NSArray *coordinates = [[placemark objectAtIndex:0] valueForKeyPath:@"Point.coordinates"];

    //I put my coordinates in my array.
    double longitude = [[coordinates objectAtIndex:0] doubleValue];
    double latitude = [[coordinates objectAtIndex:1] doubleValue];

    //Debug.
    //NSLog(@"Latitude - Longitude: %f %f", latitude, longitude);

    //I zoom my map to the area in question.
    [self zoomMapAndCenterAtLatitude:latitude andLongitude:longitude];

    [jsonString release];
}

 Finally the function to zoom my map, which should by now be a trivial thing.

 

 

 

- (void) zoomMapAndCenterAtLatitude:(double) latitude andLongitude:(double) longitude
{
    MKCoordinateRegion region;
    region.center.latitude  = latitude;
    region.center.longitude = longitude;

    //Set Zoom level using Span
    MKCoordinateSpan span;
    span.latitudeDelta  = .005;
    span.longitudeDelta = .005;
    region.span = span;

    //Move the map and zoom
    [mapView setRegion:region animated:YES];
}

 

 

 

Hope this helps someone because the JSON part was a real pain to figure out, the library is not very well documented in my opinion, still it's very good.

EDIT:

Modified one method name to "searchCoordinatesForAddress:" because of @Leo question. I have to say that this method is good as a proof of concept but if you plan to download big JSON files , you will have to append to a NSMutableData object to hold all the query to the google server. ( remember that HTTP queries come by pieces . )

 

 

In ios5 later

 

NSString *location = "some address, state, and zip";
CLGeocoder *geocoder = [[CLGeocoder alloc] init];
            [geocoder geocodeAddressString:location 
                 completionHandler:^(NSArray* placemarks, NSError* error){
                     if (placemarks && placemarks.count > 0) {
                         CLPlacemark *topResult = [placemarks objectAtIndex:0];
                         MKPlacemark *placemark = [[MKPlacemark alloc] initWithPlacemark:topResult];

                         MKCoordinateRegion region = self.mapView.region;
                         region.center = placemark.region.center;
                         region.span.longitudeDelta /= 8.0;
                         region.span.latitudeDelta /= 8.0;

                         [self.mapView setRegion:region animated:YES];
                         [self.mapView addAnnotation:placemark];
                     }
                 }
             ];

 

 

 

 

 

ending,

 

What you're after is called geocoding or forward-geocoding. Reverse-geocoding is the process of converting a lat/long pair to street address.

iOS5 provides the CLGeocoder class for geocoding. MKPlacemark supports reverse-goecoding in iOS >= 3.0. The data involved of course is very large, so your app will generally need network access to the functionality.

A good place to start is Apple's Location Awareness Programming Guide. Also, there are LOTS of questions about this here on SO. http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=geocoding

Good luck!