Building an iOS Clustered Map View

Create a new Xcode project, using the “Single View Application” template. Be sure “Language” is set to Objective-C, and that “Use Core Data” is unchecked.

ABFRealmMapView is available through CocoaPods. (If you don’t have CocoaPods installed, follow their instructions before continuing.) In your terminal, cd to the project folder you just created, and run touch Podfile. To install ABFRealmMapView, simply add the following line to the Podfile you just created:

pod "ABFRealmMapView"

In your terminal, run pod install. This will also install Realm automatically! (If this is your first time using CocoaPods, this could take a while. Future uses will be much faster.)

When it’s done, you’ll need to close the Xcode window and open the xcworkspace file that CocoaPods created, so that you can use the classes inside the pods.

In main.storyboard, add an MKMapView to the view controller, and change its “Class” (in the Identity Inspector, at the top right) to ABFRealmMapView.

Connect your data to the map. For this tutorial, we’ll be using some restaurant data, available here: RealmSFRestaurantData. This includes the locations of all the restaurants in the city of San Francisco. To install it, add the following line to your Podfile:

pod "RealmSFRestaurantData"

and run pod install again.

Adjust the ABFRealmMapView properties to specify the Realm object name and key paths for latitude, longitude, and annotation view title and subtitle. You can change these properties in Interface Builder, as shown in the image below.

In ViewController.m, add this header to the top of the file:

#import <ABFRealmMapView/ABFRealmMapView.h>
#import <RealmSFRestaurantData/SFRestaurantScores.h>

Add an IBOutlet for the ABFRealmMapView from your storyboard to this view controller.

By default, ABFRealmMapView will use the default Realm path, but since we are using data from a different location, we need to set the path to our restaurant data set. Luckily, RealmSFRestaurantData makes this easy by supplying a function to retrieve the path.<p> <p>In the same file, add the following lines after [super viewDidLoad]:

RLMRealmConfiguration *config = [RLMRealmConfiguration defaultConfiguration];
config.path = ABFRestaurantScoresPath();
self.mapView.realmConfiguration = config;

When that’s done, your ViewController.m file should look like this:

#import <ABFRealmMapView/ABFRealmMapView.h>
#import <RealmSFRestaurantData/SFRestaurantScores.h>

@interface ViewController ()
@property (strong, nonatomic) IBOutlet ABFRealmMapView *mapView;
@end

@implementation ViewController

- (void)viewDidLoad {
  [super viewDidLoad];
  // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
  RLMRealmConfiguration *config = [RLMRealmConfiguration defaultConfiguration];
  config.path = ABFRestaurantScoresPath();
  self.mapView.realmConfiguration = config;
}

That’s it! Run your app and enjoy the restaurants of San Francisco.