There are a lot of times when searching for an address using the address connection to maps, that the returned address values do not get populated (as there is a gap in the Google data).
This is especially confusing to end users, since the autocomplete suggestion implies that the address they were looking for was found initially and then the fields don’t populate.
My understanding is that provided the Lat-Long values are populated, the connected maps capability will work - so could the empty or strangely populated address fields be populated with the selected suggestion text (as opposed to the blanks returned by Google Maps).
For a scale of the issue, I’d say this happens more than 50% of the time and on some pretty significant locations. There are solutions people out there on the web utilise to deal with this Google data failing. As of now it will make my utilisation of the address field in conjunction with maps unusable, since a user won’t understand why they are able to pick their address, but then the address they picked is not returned in the data that is stored.
e.g. as examples Heathrow Airport, Stansted Airport, Gatwick Airport to name but 3 major London locations.
I’d love to understand more of this issue. I’m sure we can find a solution.
Firstly, Google has Places Autocomplete and Address Auto complete. We use here the Address auto complete, not places. So entering a name of a location is not intended to work by default.
If you’re looking for places auto complete I’m sure we can find a simple workaround or even use a third party library then use record rules to set the lat/lon of the address field.
Following that selection, this is what is returned. As you can see the address field returns blank (and makes it look like the record didnt complete or was found and that it needs searching again…very confusing user experience). In this instance the postcode (zip) returns, but sometimes even that doesnt happen and just lat and long gets populated.
By not returning the data that is prompted to the user in the address/location selection, it makes for a pretty confusing user experience.
My understanding this is symptomatic of gaps in the data returned on the Google feed, but it happens often enough that it really needs some kind of work around (given there is a point where the function serves up more information than it returns and the user makes a selection of that data).
Let me know if any other questions about it. Is close to a really great feature, but this means I cant put it in front of end users as the loss of data returned is too confusing.
Rich, I’m going to revisit this next week with the Pipes feature. I’m sure we’ll find a more viable solution. I have something in mind using Agolia but it requires a change in our record rules which we’re doing using pipes.
To be honest it’s not even just places - if I put in and select my street address “98 The Street”, the selection suggestion of the same appears and can be selected, but the value stored loses the number and only stores “The Street”.
All very confusing from the user perspective (and not much use if needing to pinpoint a building).
