Locator - Intersections - Too Much Text Required For Suggestions (Geocoding)

Question

I have a locator built on a blend of county/city centerline/address point data for PSAP usage in validating locations.  Obviously, a county will have many intersections with a combination of STATE ROUTE ##/STATE ROUTE ##, US ROUTE ##/STATE ROUTE ##, CR ##/STATE ROUTE ##, and so on.  ArcGIS locators handle this pretty well, with the exception of the amount of text you have to enter to get a useable suggestion list.

If for instance I only type in STATE ROUTE & STATE ROUT, the locator seemingly ignores the "ROUT" at the end and only recommends STATE ROUTE & STATE intersections.  If I complete the word ROUTE...

I get many more suggestions and even beyond what I'm showing in the dropdown box.

If getting results by just typing STA & STA is something that would simply be too performance-intensive for a locator, is there another way to encompass this functionality?  Can I potentially write all intersections from a locator out to a feature layer/table and do custom querying that way?  Is a locator something that can be iterated to get all of the PointAddress, StreetInt, or whatever else it may have in it?

Shana Britt · Answer

@KyleGruber The locator is going to require a few characters after the intersection connector (/, &, @) to return intersection suggestions, otherwise you would start to see street name suggestions. If I am understanding you correctly you are wanting the locator to facilitate a query like you would using select by attributes or the layer search functionality. The locator doesn't behave like this.

KyleGruber · Answer

@ShanaBritt Essentially the goal is to get intersection suggestions as soon as possible.  As soon as they enter the trigger character (/, &, etc), the locator should bring back suggestions.  If I type in Main &, it should give me the first 20 suggestions for an intersection with Main in it.

Ultimately, I was able to achieve this by creating a feature layer with all of the intersections in the map data.  I do a custom query on this feature to the LSN values of the intersection.  I then use these values to mimic the Locator suggest behavior.

As far as I can tell, there is no way to get a locator to behave this way.

Shana Britt · Answer

@KyleGruber Can you provide a screenshot of how the data is formatted in the street layer, specifically the StreetName, PrefixType fields? It's likely that having the prefix types of County Road (CR), State Route, US Route (USHWY) as part of the street name field instead of parsed into the prefix type field is contributing to the types of suggestions you are getting. You can build a multirole locator that supports PointAddress, StreetAddress, Street Intersections, Street Names, Street MidBlock, but what is the goal of the locator you are trying to build? What is the purpose of getting a list of intersection suggestions?