Geocoding advice by using Arcgis

Question

Hello everyone i have an administrative unit feature dataset (polygons) with 3 levels: Admin 1 - Province, Admin 2 - District and Admin 3 - Commune. Now i want to make a geocoding process of an address table which consists of 3 columns:Admin1, Admin2, Admin3 as same as 3 levels above. In case any record of the table have full address, it would return centroid of Admin3, if the column Admin3 is empty, it should return centroid of Admin 2 and if both of Admin3 and Admin2 are empty, the result should be centroid of Admin1. Any ideas to do this task in ArcGIS? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In ArcGIS I believe a Composite Address Locator will do what you want. You first create a seperate address locator for each of your Admin levels, then set up a composite address locator using the three admin locators. You rank your address locators in the composite locator so that it will first look at admin 3, if it doesn't find a match there it move to admin 2, and so on.