Wireless local area network (WLAN) based positioningis one of the main stream techniques for indoor positioning. In this paper, a WLAN based method is proposed based on a variational auto encoder ( VAE), which contains a positioning path and a reconstruction path. This structure has enabled the ability to position along with reconstruction of RSS radio map (RM). The proposed methodis validated by open-sourced dataset, which shows that the proposed method can increase the positioning accuracy by about 14% and 24% respectively compared to the compressive sensing (CS) based methodand the traditional kNN method in the positioning path. Moreover,from the reconstructed RM, the method can have accuracy enhancement of about 11% in positioning than that from the CS reconstructed RM. Keywords:variational