Question

I’m using the google-maps-utility-library-v3 to incorporate a Google Earth API view to a Google Maps API v3 implementation. Those Google Maps API v3 / Earth API utilities have been written by user jlivni as far as I can tell, the availability of which code has helped me greatly thus far.

(very rough working prototype of my implementation is here)

The problem I have is that I want to default (on page load) to the Google Earth view, rather than (as in the prototype above) one of the Maps API v3 standard views.

I have looked at lines 81, 131 and 133 of the (uncompiled?) googleearth.js at the above link (under src) and tried the following when setting the Maps API options within my JourneyImmersionInitialiseMapLoadGPXAnimate.js …

var myOptions = {
    zoom: 18,
    center: arr_lat_lon[currentTrk][currentTrkseg][0],
    scaleControl: true,
    tilt: 45,
    mapTypeId: earthMapType,
    overviewMapControl: true,
    overviewMapControlOptions: {
        opened: true
        }
    };

map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById("map"), myOptions);

… but get …

ReferenceError: earthMapType is not defined

Additionally I’ve tried …

mapTypeId: GoogleEarth.earthMapType,

… which results in a grey map canvas with no map type options on the top right. Once I’ve selected the Earth view from the page I can then change between the standard Earth API map types at the console in Firebug using …

earth.getInstance().getOptions().setMapType(earth.getInstance().MAP_TYPE_EARTH)

… or …

earth.getInstance().getOptions().setMapType(earth.getInstance().MAP_TYPE_SKY)

… but again, use of earthMapType or GoogleEarth.earthMapType in place of the last element results in an error at the Firebug console, this time …

Error: Error calling method on NPObject!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance

(as I’m a newbie I can’t provide more than two links in this post but wanted to add that I have looked at stackoverflow.com/questions/3039250/google-earth-integrated-with-google-maps-api-v3)

Answer 1

This library doesn’t have a public method to switch programmatically, and if you try to do it before all the setup is in place, it will fail. Ideally there would be a callback after instantiating your GoogleEarth object, but lacking that you can hack around the issue by using the private showEarth_() method on the uncompiled JS.

Noting you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time before the plugin is ready, something like this should generally do the trick:

googleEarth = new GoogleEarth(map);
setTimeout('googleEarth.showEarth_();',1000);

This is all pretty hackish, so please file a feature request on the issue tracker to add in a supported method for switching to the Earth type programmatically.