Question

I’m making an Android app that tracks a user and displays their location in real time. I have it working, but I’m having issues storing the coordinates in a database properly. Right now, the user’s location will update every second, and it stores the location in a database and then the web app pulls the most recent from the database. I want to be able to store the list of locations in one row for a particular user. I read some about GeoSpatial information in MySQL, and I think that the linestring datatype would work, but I can’t seem to find enough information about how to implement the query in PHP. Can someone provide an example of how to keep appending coordinates to the database in a linestring type using PHP? Or provide a suggestion of how to continually store coordinates using one row of a database.

Thanks

Answer 1

Simply store each point the user is located at into a table, along with an ID and timestamp. You can then assemble the points with a query.

Don’t store an entire track in one row, or you won’t be able to do much with the data later.

Edit: Here is what your table will look like:

gps_points

• id (bigint)
• user_id (int)
• timestamp (timestamp or datetime, depending on your needs)
• lat (double)
• lon (double)