chopsdogg

It seems to be all about the money for these types of API or web service interfaces. They def have something for their partners to pull in the data being requested in this thread. However, they are only going to make it available for those that are willing to pay a premium right now until they can find out how to make money off it otherwise. I stopped caching last summer because it was becoming too tedious to pull up the website before i wanted to cache, download GPX files and then load them out in the field. Trimble is a great solution, but I'm sorry I'm not paying $40 a year for premium membership at GC.com and $4-6 for a mobile phone application that would require another $30/month data plan. I think many GC'ers are in the same boat with this one. I would love to write my own app and make it available to others to load on my PDA phone with Wi-Fi built in that could pull in nearby caches or allow for logging notes, etc. I'm sure many would even approve of paying for a premium membership on this site in order for their application to use this API that supported the application. When I want to cache (or have time to cache) I want to go now. I don't have time to access this site and do my research first. Let me find a nearby cache and go! I'm still looking for a cheap solution to allow me to do this. I think it is a shame Groundspeak doesn't see the value in creating an open API (or available to premium members only) that could support this type of software. Open access is only going to help increase the interest and availability to the GC community for the users of the software that results. They are not thinking two inches in front of their nose when thinking about their revenue stream.

What you say is a great help and makes sense. I need to brush up on the XSD "syntax/language" a bit more. I didn't realize the cache.xsd only extended the WPT element instead of the whole thing. That does explain what I am seeing as you said. I think I'll have to use the gpx.xsd to get the main information and then use XPath or something like the previous posted suggested to get the rest unless I am missing something. One other thing. How do I easily tell if I should be using version 1.1 or 1.0 of the gpx.xsd. Do I just need to XPath to the version node in my .GPX file or is there some other trick? Right now I have generated the native VB classes using the 1.1 and 1.0 files and do just that.

Thank you for the reply. Reading the XML using XPath or something is trivial. I'm specifically trying to learn how to use the supplied .XSD files to create up native data structures automatically from a supplied file. You should try this out to really see the benefits of doing it this way. It is pretty slick. If you use the XSD tool to generate your class from the gpx.xsd (version 1.0 for geocaching.com .gpx files), and then modify the code I have a bit to use that instead of the cache.xsd, you can get all the information from the gpx.xsd in to a strongly type object in .NET. I am just having problems getting the geocaching.com specific data out using this method and the supplied cache.xsd definition. This is more educational purposes for myself, than trying to find something that works. I appreciate your solution that would surely work, but I really want to get this working using the supplied gpx.xsd and cache.xsd files. Any other suggestions?

I am writing a little program right now for my own learning experiences. I have found that I can take the .XSD file at http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0/gpx.xsd use the xsd tool in the .NET SDK and generate my .vb file with all the classes created up. I can use this to create an instance of the XMLSeriallizer and use this to read a .gpx file from geocaching.com. However, a lot of the information that I see in the raw XML in the .gpx (e.g. log notes) do not show up in the object that is created. I found out this is because Speakeasy has extended the gpx.xsd to the definition in cache.xsd found at http://www.Groundspeak.com/cache/1/0/cache.xsd. I tried doing the same process and creating the .vb file with all the classes using the .NET SDK tool xsd and the cache.xsd file. I am able to create up an instance of the XMLSerializer with the classes that are created. However, when I use this to read a .gpx file from geocaching.com, the only properties I see are the geocaching.com specific ones and they all have null values. 1. How do I read in both the standard GPX information as defined in http://www.topografix.com/GPX/1/0/gpx.xsd and the extended information as defined in http://www.Groundspeak.com/cache/1/0/cache.xsd in to the same object when deserilzing a .GPX file from geocaching.com? 2. Why are all the properties coming back null when using just the cache.xsd above? Or does that have to do with knowing how to do 1 above? Here is some sample code below I am using. Note the cache1_0 namespace is what was generated from the XSD tool pointing toward http://www.Groundspeak.com/cache/1/0/cache.xsd. Imports System.Xml.Serialization Imports System.Xml Public Class frmImport Dim serializer As XmlSerializer = New XmlSerializer(GetType(GCBetter.cache1_0.cache)) Dim reader As XmlTextReader Dim gpxfile As GCBetter.cache1_0.cache Private Sub btnBrowse_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnBrowse.Click If OpenFileDialog.ShowDialog().Equals(DialogResult.OK) Then reader = New XmlTextReader(OpenFileDialog.FileName) gpxfile = CType(serializer.Deserialize(reader), GCBetter.cache1_0.cache) ‘ Note the gpxfile object has some propties from the cache.xsd description, but they are all Nothing/null reader.Close() End If End Sub … End Class

I am using the PPC version of Cachemate. I like it, but can you tell me if I am missing something. With GPS Tuner I can get a compas that tells me which direction the cache is, the distance, and where the sun is in relation to my cache. In cachemate, the only thing I can figure out is how to get a bearing to the cache, but no distance. Also, would you be able to add the feature to find where the sun should be?