Our app's postal-address entry UI is a two-line Address1/Address2 field like this (borrowing screenshot from Amazon.com).
But real users' data entry is always messy. Some users will ignore our directions and will sometimes put the street address in Address1 and sometimes put it in Address2. Other users will import lists of addresses from external sources (like an existing mailing list), which will also likely cause some cases where the street address is unpredictably in Address1 or Address2.
When it comes time to geocode the address, what's a good algorithm to maximize the chance of successful geocoding if we're not sure whether the street address is in Address1 or Address2? A naive approach could be to try Address1, and if it fails then try Address2. But I'm sure I'm not the first person to try geo-coding real-world messy data entry... how is this problem usually solved?
We're using the Google Maps Geocoding API, if it matters.
I believe Google recommends using the autocomplete widget.
Have a look at the best practices document:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/best-practices
It says
Respond, in real time, to user input (includes ambiguous, incomplete, poorly formatted, or misspelled addresses entered by a user)
Use the Places API Place Autocomplete service to obtain a place ID, then the Geocoding API to geocode the place ID into a latlng.
Apartment, suite, unit etc. typically is not present in Google database. So you can bind the autocomplete to the first input where the user selects address and you can get corresponding place ID, the rest of information the user can enter in the second field which is not relevant for Google Geocoding API.
There are several examples of place autocomplete in the official documentation.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-autocomplete
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-autocomplete-addressform
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/places-placeid-geocoder
I hope this helps!
Related
I am working on a project that involves integrating the PUBG API. From my site, the player can lookup stats using their player name, platform and season. One issue I am facing is that the player name have to be exact and is case sensitive. Now I assumed it to be the case at the beginning. However, after searching for the name in this site I found that they don't need the name to be case sensitive. Also, referring to this post from the PUBG Dev community here I saw that it confirmed my initial assumption. So my question is if PUBG API requires the names to be case sensitive then, how is the site (linked) can search for the player even if the name provided is not in exact, matching case? For example,:
I looked up the player name MyCholula. From the PUBG API page for player lookup, it returns the proper value. When I tried mycholula, it doesn't and sends a 404. From the linked site above, both combination seems to work. Now if spaces or other separators were involved in the name then, it would be easy to convert it assuming that separated words are all capitalized (somewhat naive assumption though). For this name, I don't see any way of converting mycholula to MyCholula. I also tried many other combination in the linked site above (also different user names I got from my friends) to confirm that the linked site is actually returning the data as expected for any combination of user names. I also tried it on other sites like this and it didn't work just like it doesn't work from the PUBG DEV API page or from my page.
I am really confused as to how they are doing it. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that they have the player records stored in their database from where, they can perform advanced regexp based search to get the actual name. However, this sounds far fetched since, there are millions of players and it would require them to know all the player names and associated IDs. Also, as far as I know, it is not possible to use regex or other string manipulation to convert to the actual name because there can be many combinations (not an expert on regex so can't be definitive on this).
Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
In my project I have to use geocode to validate user input address fields. This includes Address, City, State, and Zip. When user entered value those information are sent to geocode server as http parameters. The return result is xml file content. I use ColdFusion 2018 as my back-end programming language. I'm able to navigate through the document and get to the section that contains data. Here is example of what I get back from geocode:
As you can see in the image above I will get the information with overall correctness of the address. My question is how this should be handled and presented to the user before I save data? Should I display the returned data back and tell them that address is 100% correct like in this case or maybe if address is not 100% show them the address as suggestion? I'm not sure which approach is the best way to go and I never used geocode before. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'm designing a REST API where, amongst others, there are two objects.
Journey
Report
For each Journey there are many Reports enroute, and each Report has exactly one associated Journey.
A user might create a Journey using the API as follows...
POST /journey/
Then retrieve the details...
GET /journey/1226/
The first question is, if a user wanted to post an Report to their Journey, which is the 'correct' URL structure that the API should impose? This seems intuitive to me...
POST /journey/1226/report/
...or is this the case...
POST /report/
...whereby in the latter, the Journey ID is passed in the request body somewhere?
The second question is, how might one go about implementing the first case in a tool such as the Django REST framework?
Thanks!
The URL/URI structure is almost completely irrelevant. It is nice to be able to read it, or easily change or even guess it, but that is it. There is no "requirement" official or unwritten how they should look like.
The point is however, that you supply the URIs to your clients in your responses. Each GET will get you a representation that contains links to the next "states" that your client can reach. This means the server has full control over URI structure, the client usually has to only know the "start" or "homepage" URI, and that's it.
Here is an article which discusses this question, has some good points: http://www.ben-morris.com/hackable-uris-may-look-nice-but-they-dont-have-much-to-do-with-rest-and-hateoas/
Pass for the second question :) I didn't use that particular framework.
I want to validate an opinion with you.
I have to design a web service that searches into a database of restaurants affiliated to a discount program in a specific country around a given address.
The REST call to such a webservice will look like http://server/search?country=<countryCode>&language=<languageCode>&address=<address>&zipcode=<zipcode>
The problem is that some countries do not have zipcodes or do not have them in the entire country.
Now, what would you do if the user passes such a parameter for a country that does not have zipcodes, but he/she passes a valid address?
Return 400 Bad request.
Simply igonre the zipcode parameter and return results based on the valid address
Return an error message in a specific format (e.g. JSON) stating that zipcodes are not supported for that country
Some colleagues are also favoring the following option
4. Simply return no results. And state in the documentation that the zipcode parameter is not supported. Also we have to create a webservice method which returns what fields should be displayed in the user interface.
What option do you think is best and why?
Thanks!
Well the OpenStreetMap Nomination Server returns results even if you dont know the ZIP Code and you can look at the results anyway. What if the user doesnt know the zip code but wants to find hist object?
I would try to search for that specific object anyway, especially because you said that some countries have zip codes partially.
If you simply return nothing te user doesnt know what went wrong and he wont know what to do.
That would depend on the use case. How easy is it for a user of the API to trigger that case? Is it a severe error which the user really should know how to avoid? Or is it something that is not entirely clear, where a user may know (or think he knows) a zipcode where officially there shouldn't be one? Does it come down to trial and error for the user how to retrieve correct results from your API? Is it a bad enough error that the user needs to be informed about it and that he needs to handle this on his side?
If you place this restriction in your API, consider that it will have to be clearly documented when this case is triggered, every user of the API will have to read and understand that documentation, it needs to be clear how to avoid the problem, it needs to be possible for the user to avoid the problem and every user will have to correctly implement extra code on his side to avoid this problem. Is it possible for the user to easily know which areas have zipcodes and which don't?
I think the mantra of "be flexible in what you accept, strict in what you output" applies...
After reading an article on REST ("Restful Grails"), I have gotten the impression that it is not possible to truly conform to a REST style in a service that demands a lot of parameters. Is this so? All the examples I have seen so far seem to imply that true REST style services are "parameterless". Using parameters would be RPC-ish and not truly RESTful.
To be more specific, say we have a service that returns graph data for stock prices, and this service needs to know the start date, end date, the currency, stock name, and whatever else might be applicable. In any case, at least 4-5 parameters are needed to retrieve the information needed.
I would imagine the URL to be something like this : /stocks/YAHOO?startDate="2008-09-01"&endDate=...
("YAHOO" is here a made-up stock name).
Would this really be REST or is this more RPC-like, what the author of the aforementioned article calls "GETful" (i.e. just low ceremony rpc)?
You can see the querystring as a filter on the resource you are GETing. Here, your resource is the stock prices of yahoo. Doing a GET on that resource give you all the available data, or the most recents. The query string filter the prices you want. Content negociation allow you to change the representation, e.g. a png graph, a csv file, and so on. To add a price, simply POST a representation (e.g. CSV) to the same resource.
The "restfulness" is not realy in the URL itself, since URIs are obscures to client, but in the way you interact with resources themselves identified by their URI
Feel free to use as many parameters as you need to identify the resource you wish to access. REST doesn't care.
Why would you think it is not possible?
Google uses REST for their charts api, and they take alot of params:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvg&chs=350x300&chd=t:20,35,10&chxr=1,0,40&chds=0,40&chco=FF0000|FFA000|00FF00&chbh=65,0,35&chxt=x,y,x&chxl=0:|High|Medium|Low|2:||Task+Priority||&chxs=2,000000,12&chtt=Tasks+on+my+To+Do+list&chts=000000,20&chg=0,25,5,5