Obtain user location from a MKMapView

iphone mkmapview core-location
joec picture joec · Jan 13, 2010 · Viewed 30.6k times · Source

Is it possible to use the MKMapView's own location manager to return the users current location to pass into a webservice?

I have mapView.showsUserLocation=YES; and this does return a valid blue dot at my location, but in the simulator, its Cupertino - which is fine, but when i look at

mapView.userLocation.coordinate.latitude, its equal to 180, whereas a CLLocationManager returns the correct one, 37.3317.

I want to avoid having multiple location managers for my three tabs, so using the mapViews own would be helpful.

Thanks.

Answer

Drew C picture Drew C · Jan 16, 2010

You can get the user location from the MKMapView. You are just missing a property in your retrieval of it. It should be:

mapView.userLocation.location.coordinate.latitude;

userLocation only stores a CLLocation location attribute and a BOOL updating attribute. You must go to the location attribute to get coordinates.

-Drew

EDIT: The MKMapView's userLocation does not update until the map has finished loading, and checking too early will return zeros. To avoid this, I suggest using the MKMapViewDelegate method -(void)mapView:(MKMapView *)mapView didUpdateUserLocation:(MKUserLocation *)userLocation.

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