Use PowerShell to get BING Map Quadkeys

I spent part of my day trying to decipher how to ask BING for map tiles from its database. You can find a lot of useful information at Bing Maps Tile System. I’m plucking through the logic of how BING handles maps for a project that I am working on. One of the mysteries is how to calculate a tile based on the zoom level and location. I am not going to go through the specifics of how this works. You can read the reference article for that. My objective was to feed a function the X and Y location values and zoom level and get the Quadkey value back. This is not going to be a stand alone function, but inside other code. Here it is.

Function ConvertQuadKeyTo-String

{

Param (

$ZoomLevel = 3,

$TileX = "3",

$TileY = "5"

)

$XVaL = [Convert]::ToString("$TileX",2)

$YVaL = [Convert]::ToString("$Tiley",2)

# Pad the values based on the zoom level.

$XVal = $XVal.Padleft($ZoomLevel,"0")

$YVal = $YVal.Padleft($ZoomLevel,"0")

# Joint the 2 values together.

# To do this, take the first character of the YVal

# and then append the first character of the XVal. Repeat.

$LoopControl = 0

$Combined = ""

$XVal = $XVal.ToCharArray()

$YVal = $YVal.toCharArray()

While ($LoopControl -lt $ZoomLevel)

{

$Combined = $Combined+ $YVal[$LoopControl] + $XVal[$LoopControl]

$LoopControl++

}

# Convert the combined number to Base4.

# Determine if there is an even or odd number of digits.

# if odd, the prepend a zero.

If ($Combined.Length % 2) {$Combined = "0"+$Combined}

# Take each pair of digits and convert them from Base 2

# to Base 10.

$QuadKey = ""

$Combined = $Combined.ToCharArray()

For($X=0;$X -lt $Combined.Length; $X+=2)

{

$String = $Combined[$X]+$Combined[$X+1]

$Int = [Convert]::ToInt32("$String",2)

$QuadKey = $QuadKey + $Int.ToString()

}

Write-Output $QuadKey

} # END: Function ConvertQuadKeyTo-String

The string that is returned in used in the request for the image. Here is the image from QuadKey “0”. Yes, I have Sapien’s PowerShell Studio 2015 engaged on this project.

Zoom level 2 at QuadKey 02

No error handling for valid values is in this code. That will be handled by another set of code.

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