Google Maps Placemark

This post has been sitting for quite a while now, pending me having time to sit down and write some text to go alongside the code. It would appear that I now have the time to write it up.

Back when I was writing my Google Maps property finder I was using Google's Geocoding API to get a set of co-ordinates based on a search string.

Specifically I was using the getLocations method of the GClientGeocoder object. This would return a number of Placemark objects with a bunch of information about the potential matches. They don't really document this object, but to be honest they don't really need to, below is an example Placemark expressed in JSON-ish notation. 

{   "id": "p1",
        "address": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA",
        "AddressDetails": {
                "Country": {
                        "CountryNameCode": "US",
                        "AdministrativeArea": {
                                "AdministrativeAreaName": "CA",
                                "SubAdministrativeArea": {
                                        "SubAdministrativeAreaName": "Santa Clara",
                                        "Locality": {
                                                "LocalityName": "Mountain View",
                                                "Thoroughfare": {
                                                        "ThoroughfareName": "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy"},
                                                        "PostalCode": {
                                                                "PostalCodeNumber": "94043"
                                                        }
                                                }
                                        }
                                }
                        },
                "Accuracy": 8
                },
        "Point": {
                "coordinates": [-122.081783,37.423111,0]
        }
}

The only thing is, if you want to get a specific element, the tree will not necessarily be the same each time, so traversal is a pain. The code below will condense all this into the root level of an object, so you can pick out the key/value pairs you want, and easily tell if some aren't there.

var Placemark = new Class({
        initialize: function(placemark){
                this.traverse(placemark);
        },
        traverse: function(item, key) {
                for (var key in item) {
                
                        if (key == 'prototype')
                                continue;
                          
                        if(typeof(item[key]) != 'object')
                                this[key] = item[key];
                        else
                                this.traverse(item[key]);
                }
        }
});

One thing to note is that this was written for to use the Mootools class system, though it shouldn't be very hard to remove this dependancy.