Can't Create a US Streets w/ Alt Names that works (ver 10)

[JoeBorgione]

I suspect I'm in for a serving of humble pie with a side of crow....  A little background:

I'm in the process of migrating to version 10.0 ArcGIS.  Over the past several years I've created hundreds of locators based on US Streets w/ alt names and have geocoded literally hundreds of thousands of addresses. ( I work in two large 9-1-1 call centers....)

Today, I've been trying to mimic my earlier successes in version 10.  However, when I try to use an alternate street name as an address it finds the wrong street. 

Example: the proper street street name is S State St.  It has an alias of S 100 E.  The  address of 4500 S State St hits just fine.  When I try 4500 S 100 E  it locates 4500 S 1100 E.  ( That is the proper name of astreet; S 1100 E and it locates it there correctly.  We have named streets with a numeric alias as well as numeric streets only.  Its a Utah thing...)

Hey, what's ten blocks when you have a house fire? You can just follow the smoke right?

Seriously... I've checked my joinitems.  I've built and rebuilt my joinitem indexes.  Perhaps I chosen the wrong type of locator; I'm using US Streets dual range.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

[BradNiemand]

I am not sure what the issue is but I can take a look.  Do you have the ability to share the data?  If so, send it to me at the email below.

Brad
bniemand@esri.com

[JoeBorgione]

My thanks to Brad N at ESRI for taking a significant amount of time to get me squared away with this.

At version 10, the address locator is a little bit more particular about field mapping with an alternate names table, specifically the alternate names suffix type.  In my case, the alterate names I use are numeric so the data doesn't contain a suffix type, only a suffix direction.  Here in Utah our streets may have a numeric street name or they may be an alpha street name.  For example, I live on S 3305 E and to get there you need to go down S Olympic Way and turn left on E Majestic Dr.

S Olympic Way is also known as S 3250 E and E Majestic Dr is aka E 4140 S.  Notice the pattern here?  No suffix types for numeric values.  To remedy this issue, Brad sugested adding a place holder field that maps to the Alias Suffix Type.  In my case I used a 1 character field called Alias_SufType to my alias table, gave it blank ( "" ) value and it's all good! Neither of us tested it with <null> value, if you want to, go for it!

Folks in the UTAH and Southern Idaho GIS communities should take note!

Another heads up from Brad is a geocoding specific patch for SP 3.  You can find it here