webservice for autosuggest on city names / postal codes including long-lat coordinates? - web-services

Question

i'm looking for a webservice, to be used for an autocomplete field,
where people can fill in either a postal code / city name or both
this service will need all cities in Europe, so we can use it for all country websites.
and in a later stadium we want to keep the world open for asia and america so this would be a plus.
preferably it would also return the long-lat coordinates for the locations,
Now it is a free textfield, after leaving the field, we hit the google geocoding service,
to find coordinates... preferably i would tie these two together.
so we don't have to query 2 services for one thing.
does anyone know of the existance of such a service online somewhere?
or would you suggest to build our own database with cities / postal codes / coordinates?
if so we would need to get the content from somewhere too, and i was trying to avoid that issue :)

Answer 1

I recently searched for a similar service, in vain.
I wanted my users to have auto-complete on entering a city name, and once a city is chosen I needed to pass the name and lat/long onto the Google API. In the end I did this: -
downloaded the geonames allcountries.zip, full extract: this
Imported it into a SQL DB via SSIS (about 7.5 million records!)
Wrote a simple query to extract just the cities (only the PPLC, PPLA and PPLA2 records).
This left me with a manageable table of 9112 records (with lat / long and country code) which covers all the cities in the world. I then wrote my own code to query the data.
Not ideal, but I needed a solution.

Answer 2

I know this post is very old but for thouse who are looking for a simple solution that can be integrated in 5 minutes here is the link:
Geocomplete jQuery...
For my case I followed this steps:
1 - Download the plugin from here.
2 - Add the jquery.geocomplete.js or jquery.geocomplete.min.js file into your javascript folder of your project.
3 - Call this file in script tags on the html page where you have the input field that you have to autocomplete with cities:
<script src='/PathToTheFile/jquery.geocomplete.js'></script>
4 - To convert an input into an autocomplete field, simply call the Geocomplete plugin in script tags: <script>
$("#IdOfTheInputField").geocomplete(); // Option 1: Call on element.
$.fn.geocomplete("input"); // Option 2: Pass element as argument.
</script>
5- You can check for the complete list of options on the link provided at the top.
Hope that this helped!