[Resolved] How do I improve my location search (beyond being a string match)?
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Have a location search where users don't need to type in exact components of the "address" string.
For instance, I live in British Columbia, Canada. Many Google Places listings have it as "BC". However, when I try to filter by location, I only can see places where the search string matches part of the address string.
Is there a setting or strategy where I can make the matches smarter or fuzzier (and generally more useful)? Is there a way to turn on the Google Places autocomplete, or something similar, for the filters?
No, that is not possible yet, but we have some featurs in the kitchen to be developed, that will make that possible.
To be precise, we plan to add Geo Location (show current users's closest spots).
There are no plans to add auto-suggest for the Addresses yet, for the following reasons:
- Google might return a different set of values, even for the very same addresses
(which would result in a "No items found")
- If we do not query the Database as well, you might be able to search for an address that does not exist in your posts, with the same result "No items found"
- If we query the Database, this creates a database bottleneck because we woudl hit the Database several times on typing.
We don't want to decrease performance.
Now, the Views Developer agreed that it might be worht trying to query the Database once, and then present those results from a Cache when you search The Address Field in the View.
This would produce the result you wish for.
This is as such a feature request and I need to assign it directly to our Views Developer due to that.
He will eventually reply you here, and take note of this request to check the possibilites.
For now, the approach is to match the content as stored, there is no autosuggest or "fuzzy" search feature.
First of all, we are aware that filtering by address fields values is falling short. We have plans for it, but they take time and we do nto want to engage into a solution until we are positive it is the best.
Right now, the only way to filter by an address field is by providing the very exact field value. As Beda mentions, adding the Google Maps autocomplete to an address field might not be the best solution. Google will return localized addresses, so anyone that has a different browser language that your stored data would get suggestions that would not match any stored result. Dead end.
We have plans to include filtering by proximity. In that case, we would ideed offer Google Maps autocomplete features to inputs, since we do not care about the exact string that you are searching by, but its coordinates and how they compare to the ones we have stored.
We also have plans to add generic autocomplete to all textfield-like fields. This is a little tricky, of course, bu doable. The idea is that once you start typing, we would hit the database to get all the values that this field can hold, just once, and cache that list for any extra search that you perform until you do another pageload. Upon typing, we can offer suggestions based on those cached results. We could even evaluate the ability of having persistent cache for such values, but that might be too complex.
As you can see, lots of plans but not a current solution now. Sorry for that.
