Is the current work around for developers trying to do this to use GPolygon, and
specify the points of the country (or other politcal boundary)?

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William - Yes. There's public data available for many places. I personally use MyMaps
to draw simplified borders and then convert the KML output to JS GPolygon statements.

I read somewhere (on usenet, sorry no url to hand) that the gpolygon approach could
run pretty slowly. I'm wondering how well it would work if I wanted to show a full
world map with countries on it. The commenter on usenet suggested that the best
approach from a performance PoV would be to use multiple image overlays for the
countries from a map server.

I'm not particularly bothered about very precise shapes as I'd probably want the map
to have a fixed viewport, but would need to have good control over the colours of the
shapes (e.g. hex values)

I can see some potential problems with finding a "definitive" list of countries
(perhaps there's an ISO list to use), but nothing insurmountable.

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This would be nice! Google has the data for use in Google Earth, but perhaps it 
can't give it away to us too?

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It would be nice to be able to use such maps as clickmaps: click on blue-colored Alabama, say, and be taken to 
wherever I have it linked.

Yes, I for one would love to have access to the hierarchical data that Google uses 
internally for geocoding or otherwise: world / country / state / ... and including 
the borders of whatever entity we're looking at (e.g. country, region, county, 
town...).

Exposing this data through an API would be a major improvement as far as I am 
concerned. For accuracy's sake it would be important to know when the data was 
verified to be correct and from which source (where possible).

A second (huge) step would be to offer an advanced version of this API by specifying 
a date parameter where the country's boundaries would be given for that date 
(supposing we're querying for a country). Of course historical data may be incomplete 
and there needs to be a mechanism to point out the known limits of the dataset. This 
would allow for building a gradually more comprehensive dataset without the 
unrealistic expectation of it being 100% complete from day 1, or any time thereafter.

To mitigate potential conflicts, the dataset could include factual data showing which 
states officially recognise which borders and which states (or towns where town 
boundaries are concerned...) refute given border claims from other states as far as 
known to dataset experts at a given point in time.

Changing status of "Accepted" issues to "Acknowledged", to clarify their 
state.

We may not be able to resolve all bugs or fulfill all feature requests, but 
we do thank you for filing them, and we will continually revisit all 
acknowledged issues and evaluate their feasibility. Thanks!

Adding my vote. Adding our own polygons also means multiple polygons for countries 
comprised of multiple land parts, such as island nations. 

Please bring the boundary data available in Google Earth to the Google Maps API.  This 
would be extremely helpful when presenting state/country information.

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This is a very old request but hopefully still on the drawing board. I think it should just be an extension of the geocoding API to return polygon coords or a google maps polygon object.

This feature should be a part of api. please take it into consideration..

Very very very interesting feature. Hope will be available soon.
Thanks!!

Would be nice, if the geocoding functions could return a polygon, for any element. Now in Google web search if I search for a street's name, sometimes a small map comes up, with the street highlighted.

i would like to use this feature on our site !

 Issue 3919  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 2582  has been merged into this issue.

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nothing new?

I create a javascript function and variable declaration for each state of the union.  HTH.

http://georgetowndctechie.blogspot.com/2012/09/cognos-10-and-google-maps-2-add-state.html 

Hi, i have to represent countries on the map in different colors.

Please add the possibility to set the color and/or outline of each country by his ISO-Code.

Greetings, Christian.

 Issue 5740  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 3955  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 6131  has been merged into this issue.

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Has there been any progress on this issue?

please make it puplic by an api function. its already in online maps when you search for a postal code, why not in the api? :(

Hi all,
Thanks for requesting this feature but disappointed to see that there hasn't been any update on this in such long time! Anyone working on this? should be simple now that it's already a feature in the maps.google.com.  

You can get the polygons from OpenStreetMap.

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 Issue 7922  has been merged into this issue.

Is it possible to display boundaries (city, state, zip, neighborhood, school ...) on a Google map using the Maps API without having to use supplementary data? We would like to use Google's up-to-date boundary data rather than using their existing, manually updated data in order to maximize efficiency and ensure accuracy. A search on maps.google.com results in a polygon outlining the zipcode boundary-- is it possible to achieve the same action and result with Maps API?

We're also in need of neighborhood boundary polygon data. When is Google going to provide it as part of the geocoding API? Any ETA? Please, advise!

Duly Noted! Would be super helpful to have this data available :)

While this doesn't answer everyone's use-cases, you can use the Embed API to embed a map on your page that shows the outline of a single region.

You can see it in action in the Embed wizard here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/start

The embed API is almost usable for this, the problem is when you use it in view mode to show a place then it places a big white infobox on the map which is unnecessary for this usage (showing a city/region highlighted on the map) and cannot be hidden using the API.

Correction: in the previous comment I wanted to say place mode, not view mode. Could you add an option to place mode of the embed API to hide the white infobox, until support for higlighting regions added to the JS api?

Great idea - I think it's different enough from this request that it should live in it's own feature request. Add a new FR for the Embed API here and I'll file it internally: https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/entry?template=Maps%20Embed%20API%20-%20Feature%20Request

OK, here it is: https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=8170

@ developer [email protected]:
your suggestion looks nice, but it is not usable to display own colors and such. where i would like to use it for, is when i have a database with a certain number connected to each province, postal code region, or city, i would like to display that in a map with different colored poly fill areas. if i search for this:
https://www.google.nl/maps/place/1687+Wognum/@52.6833955,5.0216724,14z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c8ac07758330e9:0x34b695ef00a873fd?hl=nl
this is the area i would like to use as a polygon to do with whatever i want.
Why is it so difficult to just connect the areas you allready have, to this api: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/polygon-arrays

could a google developer please let us know why they dont provide us with this? its allready in maps.google.com for a long time now, only not in the api :(

+1, as an alternative the maps api could have a function which returns polygon data for a named geographical area. This way we could do then drawing of the polygon ourselves and the maps devs should only add this function which returns the polygon data which is already available in the backend.

 Issue 8441  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 4442  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 8442  has been merged into this issue.

http://www.29travels.com/map.php has polygons for each country but you need to add the coordinates in a database.  view source code and the kml file to see the coordinates.  agreed that this would be great if added through API. 

That are only country's, I need postal codes, city's, provinces, etc

+1 What's the status on this? Will we ever have the ability to have access to say, neighbourhood boundaries and style them (line, fills, etc)? Or maybe have direct access to the polygon boundary data?

Pfff, come onnnn devs... the data is there already, only make it available...

Hi,

We are developers working on Google maps.

We are trying to display multiple locations along with Google maps provided boundaries in a single map. But we are not able to mark multiple locations along with boundaries in a single map search as depicted in the screenshot provided. We are looking for a solutions for the same.

Best regards,
-Perumal 

	google-map-multple-location-markep.png 738 KB   View   Download

 Issue 6786  has been merged into this issue.

we're all waiting for it  mcorcu...

I don't get it what takes so long when all the data is available already. This is a 7 year old request.

Yep, 7 years... I've abandoned my GMaps project 5 years ago...

BTW, how to stop receiving notifications from this thread? I've unstarred it and turned off all notifications in https://code.google.com/hosting/settings a long ago, but I still keep receiving emails (and that drives me mad sometimes).

there is a google user in charge of this topic, [email protected], but i can not see his whole address. but when i open his google code profile, i see he's in an other team also, so i mailed the leader of that google code team, [email protected], if he knows who [email protected] is and if he could point someone to this topic. that was 7 days ago... hope i will get a reply...
Bart

just got responses from the maps api team on twitter, hope they will look again at this...

‏@VolgensBartjes  16h16 hours ago
@GoogleMapsAPI who's in change of this issue? https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=109&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Introduced%20Fixed%20Summary%20Stars%20ApiType%20Internal … no update to us in 7 years

Google Maps API ‏@GoogleMapsAPI  13h13 hours ago
@VolgensBartjes We've categorized this issue as a "NeatIdea". You can see a full list of our categories here: https://goo.gl/lqaZFA 

@VolgensBartjes  7m7 minutes ago
@GoogleMapsAPI thnx, didn't seen the categories, just looked, its in the top5 starred, and in the discussion we alle think its not that  hard to do, because its allread available in the normal google maps, so the only thing that needs to happen seems to be  the connection to the public api's...

@VolgensBartjes  1m1 minute ago
@GoogleMapsAPI oh, and its also one of the most old ones....

‏@VolgensBartjes  15s15 seconds ago
@GoogleMapsAPI so, maybe the could be a re-evaluating of the issue?

need this information on api 

In our application a user needs to choose a place/location based on his autocomplete search. Without visible borders (like the one's on the maps.google.com) it's not clear to the user if he chose the right autocomplete suggestion. 

For example: He is looking for "Zurich, Switzerland" (the canton). Because he sees the borders of the city Zurich he knows he selected the "wrong" Zurich and can adjust his search to "Canton of Zurich, Switzerland" and select the correct one.

In short: Please add the feature to show/hide location borders, just like the ones already shown on maps.google.com

 Issue 4094  has been merged into this issue.

Hi everyone, are there any news about the implementation of this feature in the current Google Maps v3 API?

HI All,

just a suggestion.
you can get polygon too from Open Street Maps.
they provide an API called nominatim.

just a sample: http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?format=json&q=Tokyo,%20Chiyoda,%20Tokyo,%20Kanto,%20Japan&polygon=1&limit=2

As its taken so long, its probably not a technical issue, but rather legal. Such an API would be ripe for abuse (using it to download every county in the world or something) - and Google probably dont own all the data be able to make easily available. 

Why should it be a legal issue when it could simply work by using the area's name or its ISO code?

e.g.

api.highlight('FR')

or 

api.highlight('France')

There is no need to give out the actual polygon data, the area could be highlighted by simply naming it, as it works with regular Google Maps where when you can search for a country or something and then it's highlighted.

@[email protected] for some cases that would be enough, but most developers wants the polygon data so you could draw other colors on the map. also not only countrys with their codes are available at google, but also more region specific things, such as postal code areas here in the netherlands: 
https://www.google.nl/maps/place/1687+Wognum/@52.6833903,4.9865671,13z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x47c8ac07758330e9:0x34b695ef00a873fd?hl=nl

The api can support styling too, e.g. passing in colors:

api.highlight('FR', 'red')

And ISO codes also cover subdivisions within countries, AFAIK.

Anyway, let's see some api first, then it can be gradually improved, supporting more styling options. I don't think they'll give out polygon data for legal reasons, so it's much more feasible to request an api which supports addressing named regions.

I agree polygon data would be the best, but if it's not available then the second best things is an api which higlights regions by name or ISO code.

Woud be Nice than to give html colors for the boundary line and color and opacity for the filling. And if they make this, I hope you can just use every search term that's possible in Google too, like postal codes and villages...

 Issue 9063  has been merged into this issue.

This is a good idea. Same would be for cities and streets, and it could also be nice to be able to zoom to all that are marked in such a way (so that all will be shown to the user).

While we still wait for this feature to be implemented, please check out the same issue for static maps. If this feature could also be useful for you in static maps then please star that issue too:

https://code.google.com/p/gmaps-api-issues/issues/detail?id=7930&q=apitype%3AStatic%20type%3AEnhancement&sort=-stars&colspec=ID%20Type%20Status%20Summary%20Internal%20Stars

Issue 7930 has been merged into this issue.

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Having been playing with geometries of country/states/cities, I gained a little more insight on this topic and why the API will probably not have it any time soon.

The issue is that the amount of data (to be read as coordinates) involved is, in a lot of cases, simply staggering. Returning the boundaries as a Polygon (or MultiPolygon) would be infeasible. For example the MultiPolygon that defines the geographic boundary for Germany is ~3MB. So, including this into an API response will increase many times over the data transfer and, obviously, time required from the user end. Not to speak about what it will do to the API servers :D

So, if that wouldn't work (and if it was me it wouldn't) the other possible way is to make a separate request to get the boundaries so you can draw your polygons. It wouldn't solve the size and time issue (so your users will still wait for a while to see the boundaries drawn), but it wouldn't slow the geocode, reverse geocode, etc. requests. But in that case, there is no consistent method (at the moment, and as far as I am aware) to clearly specify which boundaries you actually want. For that to work consistently, we would have to be able to clearly address a state or a city by a unique identifier. If that would work with the Places ID, it would solve that, but I found Places ID to be inconsistent for such use cases.

Which leaves, in my opinion, the only option of requesting tiles with the boundaries already drawn. Now, obviously, these are cached and exist somewhere since they are shown on Google Maps. And this could work pretty neatly with viewport biasing. But this would make those boundaries just a picture, so, not interactive, which sort of defeats the purpose in the end, but it would still be nice to be able to get those tiles.

By passing a zoom level it shouldn't be hard to get simplified polygons, here's how it works in PostGIS:

http://www.bostongis.com/postgis_simplify.snippet

yes, as batch... said, i couldn't imagine that when you visit https://www.google.nl/maps/place/Duitsland/@51.0778957,5.9597175,6z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x479a721ec2b1be6b:0x75e85d6b8e91e55b?hl=nl that he's download 3mb of polygons?

you can also see the polygons change when zooming in and out. so what cipva... discribed, thats not the problem...
Bart

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