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- Technical Manual
Geolocation is an option on the following fields:
The option allows for location services.
When location services are enabled the field will lookup and store the longitude and latitude of the address. This enables the ability to perform a radius search (distance from other addresses), the ability to use the DISTANCE_BETWEEN expression function, and the ability to place a record on a Map Form. An external service is used to perform the lookup of the longitude and the latitude so web-service communication from the server the application resides on must be permitted.
Depending on the quality of the information given the service, and the data that the free service has available, it may find a Long/Lat that is of sufficient quality to use, or it may not. When the quality is low, and a Billing Term is setup to allow Premium Geocoding to take place, a second call is made to the premium service which is more extensive and has the capability to return higher quality results. To discuss rates and enable premium geocoding, contact billing@workxpress.com.
Note that radius searches and use of the DISTANCE_BETWEEN function can only be performed successfully on addresses that have successfully communicated with the web service and received latitude and longitude coordinates. When the setting is first enabled, the existing address vales in the Development application do not have longitude and latitude values associated with them, and will not automatically get updated with that data. You'd have to re-save those addresses in order to use the geolocation features. When you update a testing or production application, though, existing address data that has the feature enabled will automatically communicate with the web service and obtain coordinate data. This process happens in the background, so it may take some time to update all the address data. The process takes about one second per address. Please see the activity log for the application to view the progress of the update.