multiple address locator

Question

Is there a way to locate multiple addresses on a map?  I looked at the address locator sample: http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisserver/apis/silverlight/samples/start.htm#AddressToLocation

but it only locates 1 address at a time.  
If a customer has many stores in the US, for instance, I want to draw a red circle for each address on the map.  Can I do that nicely?  Hopefully, I don't have to run the Locator task for each address :( .

Thanks!

SomeGISGuy · Answer

Woa... 1000s of addresses? When do the user need to see so many addresses at one point? And why aren't these datapoints already geocoded in the geodatabase?
I guess what I'm saying is that I think you should rethink the approach you are taking. Having to have all users have to geocode all the data over and over again directly from within the client is probably not the right way to go.

ThaoNguyen · Answer

Have you tried it? Personally I would think it would be a better user-experience seeing the points pop up one by one, than have to wait much longer while nothing happens until everything suddenly pops up.

As an alternative, you could create a WCF service, send the addresses to the service, use the WPF bits on the server end to do all the geocoding, and then return the points in a big bunch. Then to the Silverlight client it would seem as a batch process.

Yes, I tried that and I could see each address popped up one by one, which looked fine to me too, but it took a while for few hundreds of addresses to show up.  If I have thousands, I'm afraid it will take long time.
Talking about geocode, currently, I create a Locator instance like this: 
Locator locatorTask = new Locator("http://sampleserver1.arcgisonline.com/ArcGIS/rest/services/" +
                            "Locators/ESRI_Geocode_USA/GeocodeServer");

The URL string now is just temporary for our evaluation.  If the software is sold to customers, where can I find legal terms about using ArcGIS geocode URL?

Thanks!

What WCF stands for?

SomeGISGuy · Answer

I can add multiple addresses to the map by creating a Locator task for each address. That works fine, but I'm not comfortable with doing this :( . I'm afraid it has performance issue.

Have you tried it? Personally I would think it would be a better user-experience seeing the points pop up one by one, than have to wait much longer while nothing happens until everything suddenly pops up.
 
As an alternative, you could create a WCF service, send the addresses to the service, use the WPF bits on the server end to do all the geocoding, and then return the points in a big bunch. Then to the Silverlight client it would seem as a batch process.