Geocoding address

Fabian_Weller · 08-01-2019 03:40 AM

When changes get queued in the sync, you can click on “Show Changes” in the menu to get a JSON file.
I added an entry with an address column like streetname and city.
Interestingly in the JSON it tells me the lat long coordinates.

"_latitudeAdresse": 48.8123447,
"_longitudeAdresse": 9.139684100000068,
"_geo_Adresse": "48.8123447, 9.139684100000068"

Can’t we get these informations in the App as a VC?

Fabian_Weller

@praveen Can you explain?

Aleksi

@Phil Any thoughts about this?

1minManager

My understanding is that Appsheet uses the Google Maps API to get a Lat Long from an Address. But unfortunately they don’t allow us to see the Lat Long data. For the last 2 years I’ve have to create, maintain and pay for my own Google Maps API that does the same

Simon@1minManager.com

pravse

It should be possible for us to do. One of the challenges is that all the addresses do not instantly get geocoded (it would take too long). They get gradually geocoded as the app is used. So for example, if there are 1000 addresses in a data set, only a fraction at a time get geocoded. So a virtual column would have inconsistent data.

Knowing this, at the start we treated this as a “display only” capability rather than a true data capability. Every time we consider exposing LatLong([AddressColumn]) as a function, we come back to this issue.

Fabian_Weller

@praveen What do you think about making it possible only for new entries or for changes in existing entries? We could use Initial Value in real columns (not VCs) and set it to Reset on Edit.
So it will not be consuming so much traffic.
Just an idea…

1minManager

Not sure if this helps but we have our’s setup as a Webhook that calls a Google Script to do the Google Maps API. The pain bit is you have to setup a Google Developer Account and add payment. Though its almost never anything other than $0

In the same way you had an integration with Twilio, could you do the same with various Google APIs? Either that or have someway for users to share Google Scripts?

Simon@1minManager.com

Nick_Haschka

wanted to bring this back up to see if we can get LatLong as a virtual display-only column to gain access to the built-in geocoding AppSheet is already doing using the Google Maps API. I realize it won't be instant and for us it really doesn't need to be. The main use case is my clients table has an address field and I'd love to use the built-in geocoding to calculate distances for other related records.

Fabian_Weller

@Steve Can you please make this a feature request?

Roderick

This is a great feature idea - let's see if we can get this moved to that board so the product team can triage.

Koichi_Tsuji

Just anchor the Address type field in the expression (like in App Formula for VC) then set the data type to Latlong. We will see the latlong values in this VC, which is the most easiest and useful implementation, thank you for bring this up.

@Fabian_Weller

Nick_Haschka

Koichi - not sure I follow the suggestion here - can you explain this further in detail so I can try it? Maybe with a screenshot or quick video example?