this week a player made some experiments with the xLocate.searchLocations and I'd like to share his questions / our answers with you. Once again: feedback is welcome!
- Question:In the SearchLocations operation, the input address is just a string. Is there any way to do this in a more structured way, so we can tell xServer what the address, city, country, etc are? For example, Bing provides query string parameters &addressLine, &locality, &countryRegion, &postalCode, &adminDistrict for this purpose.
Answer: Within the initial userstory of the MVP we focussed on the interactive single field search because this wasn't available in xLocate 1. This is the reason why we do not provide the multi field search at the moment. - Question:What format are you expecting for the country code? I was passing 2-digit iso codes to xServer v1 and am doing the same for V2 – is this correct?
Answer: You can use the ISO code to identify the country. This is already implemented. - Question:- How can I get back meta-data for the quality of the match? Fields like ClassificationDescription, DetailLevelDescription, TotalScore, etc from v1.
Answer: The classification is linked to the multi field search. As long as this mechanism isn't implemented it is not meaningful to return those properties (compared to xLocate 1). Though it would be possible to return a total score with a single field search it doesn't have a high priority: the usecase is designed for a user dialog mode and there the user decides on other criteria but not on the score. But of course: even in the single field approach the "best match" has to appear on top of the list. - Question:I’m seeing bad results in PL, ES, IT, CZ. Germany, Austria, and Belgium seem decent. Are all EU countries supported currently?
Answer: This topic is not only an engine topic but also a data topic. The current version of the data on the test system covers the countries Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxemburg, Irland and The Netherlands (according to the data providers: 100% address point completeness). Furthermore we have about 70% of France and Belgium. Countries such as Poland, Spain, Italy and Tzech Republic haven't been prepared so far. Prio is decreased as we are focusing on new data (other provider who promises much better coverage) to be refined. Our goal is to provide all european countries where we have been provided so-called address points.
