Helpful Tips for Entity Data
Note
Bing Maps for Enterprise service retirement
Bing Maps for Enterprise is deprecated and will be retired. Free (Basic) account customers can continue to use Bing Maps for Enterprise services until June 30th, 2025. Enterprise account customers can continue to use Bing Maps for Enterprise services until June 30th, 2028. To avoid service disruptions, all implementations using Bing Maps for Enterprise REST APIs and SDKs will need to be updated to use Azure Maps by the retirement date that applies to your Bing Maps for Enterprise account type.
Azure Maps is Microsoft's next-generation maps and geospatial services for developers. Azure Maps has many of the same features as Bing Maps for Enterprise, and more. To get started with Azure Maps, create a free Azure subscription and an Azure Maps account. For more information about azure Maps, see Azure Maps Documentation. For migration guidance, see Bing Maps Migration Overview.
Here are some tips to help you when you create entity data to use with the Bing Spatial Data Services.
Consider using pipe(|)-delimited or XML entity data files. Entity data often contains commas (Example: Seattle, WA). Therefore, using the pipe (|) character as a separator in entity data files is often a good choice. Similarly, XML files support the use of commas (,), hyphens (-), and pipe characters (|) as part of entity data values.
Make sure you do not create more than the maximum number of 350 properties. For a list of supported data types, see Data Schema and Sample Input. To reduce the number of string (Edm.String) properties, consider the following options.
Remove unnecessary or redundant properties.
Convert a property with 'yes' and 'no' string values to a Boolean property with true and false values.
Combine two or more string properties into a single string property by using a secondary delimiter, such as a dash (-).For example, if your entity data included an opening and closing time and you do not need to query on these values separately, you could combine them into a single string, such as '8:00 – 5:00'. If you needed to separate these values for a web application, use client-side parsing.
If you are using XML to format your entity data, you can also use the pipe (|) character as a delimiter.
Consider converting numeric information such as phone numbers to an integer property. Note that a leading 0 in a number will not be stored in this scenario. However, you can accommodate for this if all the numbers are the same length. Also, if a number is not provided, the default value of zero (0) is stored.
Make sure you specify a primary key in your data schema and that each set of entity data has a unique primary key value.
Make sure latitude and longitude properties are included in the data schema. The latitude and longitude properties do not count towards the maximum number of properties with a data type of double (Edm.Double).
Do not store HTML with entity data. HTML tags cannot be stored as entity data. If an entity value is used in the HTML of a web application, you can store the value in the data source, and then generate the HTML by using client-side processing. For example, you can store the URL for an image as entity data and then build the HTML image using client-side code.
When possible, reduce the resolution of latitude and longitude values to six decimal places or less. This reduces the size of a data source query and reduces the response size. The response download time can be noticeable with mobile applications.