Manually overriding Site Geocoding attributes
As some of our customers had noticed, entering a Site address as a one liner instead of multiple fields for city, region and country came with some occasional misfires.
We've fixed this in our UI, so that you can always override these issues manually when they happen.
What was the problem?
We chose for our users to enter their Site locations via one-liner addresses. Upon saving a site, the provided one-liner address is issued to the Google Maps API and we interpret the results to store the following attributes for the site:
- City
- Region
- Country
- Lat/Long
Address formats vary from one country to another, and so does the data structure for an address returned by Google Map's API. Based on this returned data structure, we attribute City, Region and Country based on our deciphering of this data structure, which changes for every country, meaning that sometimes we get it wrong, here's an example
...where the resulting address in the Site object is as follows
...unfortunately, the city here should be Barueri
, because Tamboré
is the name of the neighborhood.
The solution
While this issue is a rare occurrence, it hits some geographies much more than others, with the cognitive load borne by our customers in these locations: a Data Explorer query returning a City they have never heard of...
This is why we are now allowing our users to override these values manually by selecting a City, Region and Country of their choice if they so desire - in continuation of the previous example: