Microsoft added geospatial support, which lets you store location data in your documents and perform spatial calculations for distance and intersections between points and polygons.

• Spatial data describes the position and shape of objects in space.

• Typically, it can be used to represent the location of a person, a place of interest, or the boundary of a city, or a lake.

• Common use cases often involve proximity queries. For e.g., “find all universities near my current location”.

A Point denotes a single position in space which represents the exact location, e.g. street address of particular university. A point is represented in DocumentDB using its coordinate pair (longitude and latitude). Following is an example of JSON point.

{
   "type":"Point",
   "coordinates":[ 28.3, -10.7 ]
}

Let’s take a look at a simple example which contains the location of a university.

{
   "id":"case-university",
   "name":"CASE: Center For Advanced Studies In Engineering",
   "city":"Islamabad",

   "location": {
      "type":"Point",
      "coordinates":[ 33.7194136, -73.0964862 ]
   }
}

To retrieve the university name based on the location, you can use the following query.

SELECT c.name FROM c

WHERE c.id = "case-university" AND ST_ISVALID({
      "type":"Point",
      "coordinates":[ 33.7194136, -73.0964862 ] })

When the above query is executed you will receive the following output.

[
   {
      "name": "CASE: Center For Advanced Studies In Engineering"
   }
]

Create Document with Geospatial Data in .NET

You can create a document with geospatial data, let’s take a look at a simple example in which a university document is created.

private async static Task CreateDocuments(DocumentClient client) {
   Console.WriteLine();
   Console.WriteLine("**** Create Documents ****");
   Console.WriteLine();

   var uniDocument = new UniversityProfile {
      Id = "nust",
      Name = "National University of Sciences and Technology",
      City = "Islamabad",
      Loc = new Point(33.6455715, 72.9903447)
   };

   Document document = await CreateDocument(client, uniDocument);
   Console.WriteLine("Created document {0} from typed object", document.Id);
   Console.WriteLine();
}

Following is the implementation for the UniversityProfile class.

public class UniversityProfile {
   [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "id")]
   public string Id { get; set; }

   [JsonProperty("name")]
   public string Name { get; set; }

   [JsonProperty("city")]
   public string City { get; set; }

   [JsonProperty("location")]
   public Point Loc { get; set; }
}

When the above code is compiled and executed, you will receive the following output.

**** Create Documents ****
Created new document: nust
{
   "id": "nust",
   "name": "National University of Sciences and Technology",
   "city": "Islamabad",
   "location": {
      "type": "Point",
      "coordinates": [
         33.6455715,
         72.9903447
      ]
   },
   "_rid": "Ic8LAMEUVgANAAAAAAAAAA==",
   "_ts": 1450200910,
   "_self": "dbs/Ic8LAA==/colls/Ic8LAMEUVgA=/docs/Ic8LAMEUVgANAAAAAAAAAA==/",
   "_etag": ""00004100-0000-0000-0000-56704f4e0000"",
   "_attachments": "attachments/"
}
Created document nust from typed object