Geocoding Addresses with Apartment Units

[Greene_Chris]

Hi all -

It's been a tedious slog with address locators in 10 so far. Now that the zip code/city/state issues has been resolved with sp1, we are now trying to tackle the addresses with units. 

It seems that the USAddress - Single House locator best fits our needs. I have been setting the Additional Field to our unit field yet when looking at the geocoding results it's obvious that the locator is not seeing this additional field value as an apartment unit. For example, when using the find tool to locate 115 Brown St A, nothing found. However, a search for 115 Brown St will return two options, neither one containing the additional unit information. Has anyone else come across this and found a work around?

As a side note, to get around the zip code issue, I did load in the 931 locators which worked great until I needed to assign privileges to other user groups.

Thanks in advance-

Chris

[NedCake]

Hi Brad,
I am attempting to use the style you posted on 5/24/11 to publish a geocoding service in ArcGIS Server. My locator uses a point address feature class and a place name alias table. The locator works fine until I publish it. Unfortunately, in the published version all references to the alias table are removed. The locator service works but will no locate place names.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
Ned

[BradNiemand]

This is a known issue with 10.0 locators.

Brad

[BrianOevermann]

Brad,
I used the White Paper to create my own locator .lot file for units as well as my address fractional field. I have some questions that I hope you can answer.

Overall, when I use a locator built on this .lot, it returns all of the valid addresses (i.e. ALL of the unit points within the apartment complex). This also happens with the successful matches with addresses having a fractional (i.e. 80A N Main St).  How do I "force" the locator to push the record with the actual unit or fractional match I am searching for to the very top?

Also, regarding the fractional field, I have been unable to match a "half" address (i.e. 440 1/2 N Main St).  If I simply locate 440 N Main St, the system returns the "half" record.  I think I am missing something really basic in the formatting but I'm stumped.

I compared my .lot with the version you posted and mine gets around the persistent "#" sign by using our UnitType (unit, ste, #) field along with the UnitNumber field.  But I realize not everyone maintains their data in this way.

I am running SP1 at the moment, and I've attached my .lot.

Thanks for any insight,
Brian

[BradNiemand]

I am not too sure where you are going wrong here but I am attaching the latest style.  Maybe some of the issues you are having have been addressed in this style.

Brad

[BrianOevermann]

Brad,

Thank you for the latest style sample.  It definitely filled in the gaps that the customization white paper fails to cover.  My functional style file is attached.  It honors fractional address fields as well as separate unit type and unit number fields.  I hope folks find it useful if their data is structured in a similar way!  Share it far and wide and please, ESRI, polish it and include it as a default in 10.1!  I never want to have the need to do this customization again!

You need to place this style file in the locator directory of your ArcGIS install.  The default location is:
C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Desktop10.0\Locators

Our site address data layer uses the following fields:
Address
Address Fractional (i.e. the "A" or "1/2" in "80 A Main St" or "80 1/2 Main St")
Prefix Direction
Street Name
Street Type
Suffix Direction
Unit Type (i.e. Unit, Ste, #)
Unit Number
City
ZIP Code
State

The style has not been tested in any other configurations.

EDIT:  We are currently on SP1--no testing with SP2 has been done!

Enjoy,
Brian

[PatrickCorley]

Brian,

Do you happen to have a 9.3.1 version of this?

[BrianOevermann]

@Patrick Corley: In response to your question regarding a 9.3.1 version--maybe? It's been so long that I don't remember what the format for those styles should be, but I have in my archive a .lot file that I believe was the "pre-version 10" style.

I am attaching it here but have no way of checking/testing to see if this is actually what you need. Please respond here with either success or failure in using the attached file, simply so others can have a status update regarding the usefulness or uselessness of the file.

Brian

[PatrickCorley]

I get the following message when trying to create the locator:

[BrianOevermann]

Patrick,

ArcGIS 9.3.1 was a very long time ago for me and I no longer have a machine with that version installed. As I mentioned, I am not even sure that what I offered up as a possible 9.3.1 solution is even correct. My suggestion would be to compare the "standard" locator styles installed on your machine with those from the zip file and see what differences there are.

[ChristopherGraff]

Everyone's advice has been extremely helpful, but I'm stuck on one point:

If I geocode an address that has a root location as well as sub/unit locations the geocoder always returns all matches.  For all apartment completexes we have a root address (123 Main St) as well as unit addresses for each apartment (123 Main St #1, #2, etc).  If a user geocodes "123 Main St" the root address should have a higher score than "123 Main St #1".  How can I accomplish this?  Or is it just not possible?

thanks in advance,
-chris