SDK for iOS Developer's Guide

Custom Location Extension 2

Custom Location Extension 2 (CLE2) allows you to easily distribute custom geospatial information in your mobile applications. Through CLE2 you can programatically insert spatial content to the local database and upload it to the server for data sharing purposes. You can also also perform online or offline searches. These features effectively turns SDK for iOS into a lightweight spatial storage solution that enables insertion and query for geospatial information using optimized algorithms.

The classes that support this feature are located under NMA Custom Location Extension 2 group. Instead of having specific interfaces for location and geometry requests CLE2 unifies all use cases in one flexible approach: the returned value always contains one of the geometry types (such as NMACLE2GeometryPoint), along with a set of 0 to N user-defined attributes that can represent any information. There is no implied structure in these attributes. These attributes are made available as a map of key and attribute values.

Some examples of how you can use these CLE2 features include:

  • Show all users' custom Points of Interest (POIs) within a 2km radius.
  • Online or offline search for all customer offices within Germany using an area defined by a polygon, then display the offices' reception phone numbers, employee counts, and other details.
  • Edit geometry shapes in real time in offline mode and perform queries against them to get notifications when such shapes intersect with other existing fixed shapes and other basic Geofencing solutions. For example, this can be a ‘moving platform’, e.g. ships near ship docks, where locations are relative to GPS movements.
  • Sharing Points of Interest that are not officially available as part of HERE map data, such as city facilities and outdoor basketball courts.
  • Persist GPS data that is tied to arbitrary data, e.g. hiking trails with speed, even during offline mode.
  • Search for specific types of objects that are near a given route.

Layers and Filtering

All data is organized in the form of layers. When uploading, storing, or searching for information, a layer name string is specified and can be used to better filter relevant information.

Further filtering is possible by checking the geometry attributes. These attributes are user-defined fields that are linked to a geometry, such as NMACLE2GeometryPoint, and can be text or number fields.

Note: CLE2 search is restricted per layer by app credentials. To manage the access restriction of a Custom Location layer, contact your Custom Location administrator. If you do not have one, see Service Support to contact us for more details .

Inserting and Uploading Data

To upload CLE2 data, use the web interface or REST APIs. Refer to the following User Guide for more details: https://developer.here.com/documentation.

It is also possible to insert data locally and to the server via SDK for iOS. HERE SDK makes it straightforward to generate any location-referenced data even when storing it locally offline and sequentially sharing that information to other devices when a connection is established.

Performing Spatial Searches

To perform a search, choose one of the search types as shown below. A common input parameter to all requests is the searched layer name.

Table 1. Search Classes
Search Type Description Class Name
Proximity Retrieve geometries that are within a given radius from a center. NMACLE2ProximityRequest
Corridor Retrieve geometries along a route specified by a sequence of coordinates. NMACLE2CorridorRequest
Bounding box Retrieve geometries within a specified rectangular geographic area. NMACLE2BoundingBoxRequest
Quadkey Retrieve geometries that fall within a specified QuadKey. NMACLE2QuadkeyRequest
Attribute Retrieve all geometries that match with a specified query. This type of search is only available online. NMACLE2AttributeRequest

Each of the search request types supports some common properties as listed below.

Table 2. Common Request Arguments
Property Description Example Values
geometryType Specifies geometry type to be given in the result (online only), see details below on "Understanding the search results".
  • NMACLE2GeometryFull
  • NMACLE2GeometryLocal
  • NMACLE2GeometryNone
cachingEnabled Default is False. If enabled, geometries received from such online search request will be stored locally.  
query Currently available for online requests only, this property allows a query filter to be specified on the user's geometry attributes so that only geometries that pass the filter were returned. Accepted strings are free form text with simple equality and comparison operators.  

Once you have a search request object created and set up according to your needs, call its startWithListener: or startWithBlock: methods. The result of the search will be delivered to the provided block or listener. You can get the geometries that matched search criteria from a CLE2Result object by calling getGeometries(). This list of geometry results may contain objects of the following types:

Table 3. Geometry Return Types
Class Geometry Description Main Properties
NMACLE2Geometry Base class for all other geometry return values containing user-defined attributes. NSDictionary<NSString *, NSString *> *attributes
NMACLE2GeometryPoint Represents a point in coordinates. Relates to a Point in WKT. NMAGeoCoordinates *coordinates
NMACLE2GeometryMultiPoint Represents a multi-point as a coordinates array. Relates to a MultiPoint in WKT. NSArray<NMAGeoCoordinates *> *coordinatesArray
NMACLE2GeometryPolyline Represents a polyline as an NMAGeoPolyline. Relates to a WKT LineString object. NMAGeoPolyline *geoPolyline
NMACLE2GeometryMultiPolyline Represents a multi-polyline as an array of NMAGeoPolyline. Relates to a WKT MultiLineString object. NSArray<NMAGeoPolyline *> *multiPolylineArray
NMACLE2GeometryPolygon Represents a polygon with an NMAGeoPolygon for the outer ring and an array of NMAGeoPolygon for inner holes. Relates to a WKT polygon object containing all rings of this geometry. NMAGeoPolygon *outerRing, NSArray<NMAGeoPolygon *> *innerRings
NMACLE2GeometryMultiPolygon Represents a multi-polygon as an array of NMACLE2GeometryPolygon. Relates to a MultiPolygon object in WKT. NSArray<NMACLE2GeometryPolygon *> *multiPolygonArray

In OpenGIS (the implementation standard for Geographic Information) and WKT representation formats the concept of a polygon is defined by one outer ring polygon plus zero or more inner hole polygons. This is the reason why the class NMACLE2GeometryPolygon contains an NMAGeoPolygon and a secondary NMAGeoPolygon array.

Proximity Search Request Example

To perform a custom location search, you need to create an NMACLE2ProximityRequest using initWithLayer:center:radius or initWithLayers:center:radius methods.

Proximity search returns a list of custom geometries that fall within a specified radius of an NMAGeoCoordinates location. For example, the following code shows how to perform search for all locations in the previously mentioned stores layer that exists within an 8 kilometre radius of Frankfurt Central Station:


NMACLE2ProximityRequest * proximityRequest;
proximityRequest= [[NMACLE2ProximityRequest alloc] initWithLayer:@"HERE_SITES"
       center:[NMAGeoCoordinates geoCoordinatesWithLatitude:49.196261
          longitude:-123.004773]
       radius:8000]; // 8km

// Perform the request
[proximityRequest startWithBlock:^(NMACLE2Request *request, NMACLE2Result * result, NSError *error) {
    if(!error) {
      // use result.geometriesArray to retrieve list of found NMACLE2Geometry results
    }
  }];

The Layer ID parameter represents a set of custom uploaded geometries. For example, "HERE_SITES" layer ID represents a sample layer that contains locations of HERE offices in Germany. Since offices are represented by simple points, the returned geometries are of type NMACLE2GeometryPoint.

You can also perform proximity search on different layers at the same time:


NSArray *layers = @[@"LAYER_1", @"LAYER_2"];
NMACLE2ProximityRequest * proximityRequest;
proximityRequest= [[NMACLE2ProximityRequest alloc] initWithLayers:layers
       center:[NMAGeoCoordinates geoCoordinatesWithLatitude:50.113905
              longitude:8.677608]
       radius:500]; // 500 meters

// Perform the request
[proximityRequest startWithBlock:^(NMACLE2Request *request, NMACLE2Result * result, NSError *error) {
    if(!error) {
      // use result.geometriesArray to retrieve list of found NMACLE2Geometry results
    }
  }];

After creating a request object you can call startWithBlock: method to launch the search request and listen for search results.

You can also add a filter to the request. A filter is a JavaScript-like expression that is evaluated for each location-matching search query. When specified, only geometries for which the expression evaluates to true, e.g. when attributes are matching, are returned. For example, if you want to find geometries that have the custom location parameter of rating that is greater than 3 and the attribute "NAME" as "MyPlace23", perform the following:


NMACLE2ProximityRequest * proximityRequest;
proximityRequest= [[NMACLE2ProximityRequest alloc] initWithLayer:@"HERE_SITES"
       center:[NMAGeoCoordinates geoCoordinatesWithLatitude:49.196261
              longitude:-123.004773]
       radius:8000]; // 8 km

[proximityRequest setQuery:@"CITY == 'Burnaby' && NAME1 != 'MyPlace'"];

// Perform the request
[proximityRequest startWithBlock:^(NMACLE2Request *request, NMACLE2Result * result, NSError *error) {
    if(!error) {
      // use result.geometriesArray to retrieve list of found NMACLE2Geometry results
    }
  }];

Iterating Through Results

The NMACLE2Result object contains an NSArray with all the NMACLE2Geometry objects found. Since different objects can be returned, it is recommended to test for type before using the returned geometry. For example, you can perform the following inside the request completion block:


for (NMACLE2Geometry *currentLocation in result.geometries) {
  if([currentLocation isKindOfClass:[NMACLE2GeometryMultiPoint class])
  {
    NMACLE2GeometryMultiPoint *multiPoint = (NMACLE2GeometryMultiPoint *)currentLocation;
    // multiPoint.coordinatesArray is an NSArray containing the found NMAGeoCoordinates
    NSLog(@"Found %lu coordinates", (unsigned long)[multiPoint.coordinatesArray count]);
    NSLog(@"Geometry attributes: %@", multiPoint.attributes);
  }
}

Each found NMACLE2GeometryMultiPoint contains two important properties: a coordinates NSArray and an attributes NSDictionary with flexible user-defined fields.