In chasing known portal issues, I have thought of an application that could place real estate records on the map. Interesting is that known portal in some of the European countries (Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria): OLX doesn’t have map representation of their advertisements. Let’s resolve this problem using known technologies to create OLX Mapper!
If you are on a mobile device! For a better experience please open the OLX Mapper in the new tab under:
https://smartcarto.com/olxmapper/olxmapper.html
Methods
FME Server – left side of app window which is responsible for choosing parameters and triggering a run. This is basically an FME Server App triggering a workspace fetching OLX Records. The same workspace is also geocoding records, and constructing Leaflet maps. What is also important, I am hosting FME Server on my home Ubuntu computer/server which I have prepared in my free time.
Leaflet – FME Workspace is embedding mapping application code which is responsible for visualizing the results. Here I based on LeafletVectorMap Custom Transformer for FME and modified it for my needs. The transformer is embedding GeoJSON in HTML/JS code.
The most recent generated four maps are present on the right side of the application. It is also possible to visit the one-page result map which link is available below zoom options.
After FME Server is finishing its record fetching and generating the HTML with Leaflet, the website is performing a simple refresh to provide the latest results visible in the OLX Mapper app.
Performance
OLX is limiting results to 25 pages, 1 page is having 44 records, so a maximum of 1100 records can be visualised on the map. However mark this will last quite long, my test for search phrase “dom” which is a house in polish lasted almost minutes of FME Server work.
To speed up the translation, it is possible and advised to limit the searched area to a smaller country administration unit.
FME Server has one engine so it is performing one job at a time. If there is another job incoming, the server is queueing and triggering after the first one is finished.
Refreshing of the website after processing can sometimes not occur – depends on your browser caching). So you will see the “Completed” job and no results. In such a case you should manually reload the webpage.
Enhancements of OLX Mapper
For now, I have implemented only Polish and Romanian OLX portals. Of course, if there will be an interest I can move on with implementing the next language versions. Let me know what you think in the comments below.