Maps, geocoding and address fields

[Sonya*]

Last night I have looked into address fields, geocoding and maps integration in IPS. When you use address field AND have maps enhancement (either Mapbox or Google Maps) enabled, you get nice piece of map. To see this in action, you can setup a Club with location. I like the idea to have maps out of the box.

However there is a small issue. Technically IPS saves address AND coordinates (latitude and longitude) get from geocoding service. If you enable Mapbox first, then Mapbox is used to save coordinates. Unfortunately Mapbox is not nearly so gut as Google Maps. Its geocoding sucks for the most addresses I have tested (I am not in US, so I cannot evaluate how good it is for US addresses). You can play around with Mapbox to see if your addresses are resolved correctly here: https://www.mapbox.com/api-playground/ The very poor coordinates are then saved along with address in IPS. Now if you switch to Google Maps to get maps more precise you will see that Google "cannot" resolve the addresses either. However if you use Google Maps just in browser you will get correct results. The issue is: IPS saves coordinates once they have been determined. After switching to Google Maps there is no new geocoding for the address already saved. The API of Google Maps in IPS still uses poor coordinates that have been determined by Mapbox earlier.

So if you have a bunch of data that you enter at once you should enable Google Maps service first! This way you get perfect coordinates. If you then switch to Mapbox it will use coordinates previously determined by Google Maps and they are much more better.

I wish there were a setting to wipe out all coordinates from address fields before switching to another maps service.