My Method

in the documentation you

Variables
You can pass some parameters to your SQL clause.

Today it is done for used ID, if you want to restrict by user, you can use :userid variable

For example, here SQL text for getting placemarks

SELECT latitude as lat, longitude as lng, createddate, title, description, descriptionhtml, icontype
FROM demo_zhosmmaps_markers as t
WHERE t.mapid = 2
and t.createdbyuser=:userid
In this case variable will be replaced with current user ID value

I am not sure what you mean by this , is there a way that I could pass say a Flight NUmber as a variable to the Visualisation selection so that i could get my pairs pf coordinates such as

SELECT latitude as lat, longitude as lng
FROM airportroutes as t
WHERE t.route = :flight

As your wording seems to suggest that only :USERID can be used as a variable

Hi
I'll reply there for your 3 posts, due to its for one case.

As I can see you have csv file with airports.
You can upload this file and got all your airports as placemarks.
After that you can easy create article for each airport page, for example with description and so on, and call there plugin to show map. Map will be centered to your airport placemark automatically.
It will more easy that you fighting with templates, modules and so on.

As result
One map definition, you can also show all your placemarks on one map.

You can use your data more flexible.

As for visualization. It is not very flexible to show only static data. It is more usable to show dynamic data, where one visualization item (path or placemark) means current location or track of something (like plane or bird (on one site it displays tracks of birds)).

Thanks for the reply , I used my method as I may want to put other information on the map header and footer on an individual airport by airport basis or colouring the pin differently depending on number of flights made to and from the airport.
Regarding Visualisation I will have two sets of co-ordinates one for the Departure Airport and one for the arrival Airport so in theory the data is not STATIC as the flight number will determine the departure and arrival airports and thus the two different sets of Latitude and Longitude pairs
For example a flight from OSLO to DUBLIN will have different co-ordinates to a flight from AMSTERDAM to GLASGOW as these airports are in different parts of the world so a line from OSLO to DUBLIN will go in a WESTERLY direction and the other flight in a NORTHERLY direction.

My concept is that a pilot will select one of my flights from my database and I will display various data about the flight and this data would include a map showing the flight route (Yes I know it would be a straight line and in real life the flight is a series of waypoints) but this would just be a guideline