Help Required - RE Web developer

[Coachhirecomparison]

Hi all,

any advice here would be great

If you produce a website where a customer enters a post code or location and is then presented with the nearest first, would you think that our web developer should have mentioned to us about duplicate location names, i.e. if you enter Newcastle there is an option of more than one Newcastle.

Well they didnt and when a customer enters a location which has a duplicate they risk receiving the wrong information.

Should our developer have mentioned this problem when we were at the beginning of development or even quoting stage?

If it is of any use, we are with postcode anywhere.

Thanks in advance
James

 

[DesignerNick]

Usually they have town or city and then county to confirm it.

It shouldn't be a big job to add counties after each town / city in the database depending on where they get the data.

They should probably have picked up on it at the testing stage or when they were developing the script to find the nearest.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Our site uses lat/long proper geospacial technology, but that ain't cheap. As pointed out above, a simple work around is counties.

 

[akirk]

hopefully yes, contractually not necessarily

any system like that will be using a lookup table of places against which the search is taking place - who provided that standing data? Did you? Did they? Is it a standard set from the OS / Royal Mail / ???

Ideally:
- the data would have each combination
- step 1 of the code would check how many matches there are
- step 2 of the code would present multi-matches to the user for clarification
- step 3 of the code would translate the chosen match (from the multiiple matches, or directly if only one result in step 1) into the unique db code referencing that match
- step 4+ would then present results etc. based on that unique db code which steps 1-3 were designed to find...

Postcodes are unique, place names are not, and with both it is also possible for the user to mistype, so there needs to be a filtering basis...

I would guess though that you didn't spec. this? in which case you may have got what you specced, even though it is not what you need...

this may not be an awful lot of work to add in...
talk to the developers about what it will take to add it...

any issues - drop me a PM

Alasdair

 

[Coachhirecomparison]

hopefully yes, contractually not necessarily

any system like that will be using a lookup table of places against which the search is taking place - who provided that standing data? Did you? Did they? Is it a standard set from the OS / Royal Mail / ???

Ideally:
- the data would have each combination
- step 1 of the code would check how many matches there are
- step 2 of the code would present multi-matches to the user for clarification
- step 3 of the code would translate the chosen match (from the multiiple matches, or directly if only one result in step 1) into the unique db code referencing that match
- step 4+ would then present results etc. based on that unique db code which steps 1-3 were designed to find...

Postcodes are unique, place names are not, and with both it is also possible for the user to mistype, so there needs to be a filtering basis...

I would guess though that you didn't spec. this? in which case you may have got what you specced, even though it is not what you need...

this may not be an awful lot of work to add in...
talk to the developers about what it will take to add it...

any issues - drop me a PM

Alasdair

Thank you for this.

We never even thought about duplicate locations when we specced the site but we would expect the developer to mention this to us as it is quite a big part of the search process.

We are paying for credits from postcode anywhere.

 

[WirralPrinters]

Hi all,

any advice here would be great

If you produce a website where a customer enters a post code or location and is then presented with the nearest first, would you think that our web developer should have mentioned to us about duplicate location names, i.e. if you enter Newcastle there is an option of more than one Newcastle.

Well they didnt and when a customer enters a location which has a duplicate they risk receiving the wrong information.

Should our developer have mentioned this problem when we were at the beginning of development or even quoting stage?

If it is of any use, we are with postcode anywhere.

Thanks in advance
James

This is not possible in the UK without purchasing the PAF database from Royal Mail.

Unlike the USA for example, were this is extremely easy to do and free, I have also written PHP code to do this for the UK, without the actual database of postcodes, how can this be achieved?

There are leaked ones but extremely incorrect.

I have many emails from Royal Mail regarding this very same issue but they would not allow me to post their replies on my site... I wonder why

 

[akirk]

plenty of gazeteers out there without having to use PAF... you can use OS / Google / etc. to fire in searches and get back lat long. Some of that data is even available for download... postcode anywhere is based on Royal Mail data (which means that it will be inaccurate as Royal Mail is excluded from DPA as they don't store info against people and thus have no obligation to accurate data!)

if you are using an online lookup - who specced that - and how is it being used...

I think that you need to talk to your developers - postcode anywhere can do street and postcode validation etc. - so is the issue in the code written by your developers, or the service provided by postcode anywhere?

Alasdair

 

[WirralPrinters]

plenty of gazeteers out there without having to use PAF... you can use OS / Google / etc. to fire in searches and get back lat long. Some of that data is even available for download... postcode anywhere is based on Royal Mail data (which means that it will be inaccurate as Royal Mail is excluded from DPA as they don't store info against people and thus have no obligation to accurate data!)

if you are using an online lookup - who specced that - and how is it being used...

I think that you need to talk to your developers - postcode anywhere can do street and postcode validation etc. - so is the issue in the code written by your developers, or the service provided by postcode anywhere?

Alasdair

An entire UK postcode lookup is not possible to include in your own SQL database etc without paying for it.

Google is also inaccurate.

I know very much about this subject!!!!!! This is part and the course of owning directories in the UK.

 

[woodss]

I've written stuff that does a query to the Yahoo and Google Maps API to get lat/lons from address lookups, and akirk (above) is absolutely correct.

 

[akirk]

An entire UK postcode lookup is not possible to include in your own SQL database etc without paying for it.

Google is also inaccurate.

I know very much about this subject!!!!!! This is part and the course of owning directories in the UK.

Alasdair

 

[elliot.rigsby]

From my experience they always have wriggle room in these instances. They probably should have pointed this out but I doubt you will get any joy from them. It will cost too much to pursue.