I am almost complete with another site but have a feature left that I still need to do, basically it entails the following:
There are entries stored in a MySQL database, and each entry has a postcode.
The user uses a “search form” and enters their postcode and selects a distance from a dropdown, the values are “Any, 1mile, 5miles, 10miles, 100miles”.
The user hits the search button and a SQL query is executed and returns all entries in the database which have the above distance from the above postcode.
Anyone know how to achieve this?
I have Googled around and found a few solutions but they aren’t exactly what I’m looking for, they all seem to be about determining the distance between 2 given postcodes.
My script is quite different as you can see…
Any thoughts, comments or “full on solutions” are very very welcome
If you know my postcode, then you also know my postcode location (lat, lng).
If I now want to search for Garden Centres (or whatever) whose location (lat, lng) falls inside a circle then you are going to want an sql search like this one.
If this is just a bell or a whistle on the website you are developing, then you should be fine.
If it turns out that this is generating a lot of traffic (and server-side computations) then seriously consider using Mysql’s native spatial abilities by not simply storing lat, lng pairs but POINT(x,y) as well. You should get selects a lot quicker using [google]mysql spatial point[/google] – but as I say, don’t bother unless you see proof that you need to learn this – unless it turns you on of course …