How to Have Geocoding Service Return Results from Partial Street Name Input?

Question

Currently we have an address geocoding service published to ArcGIS Server that is being utilized by an ArcGIS Viewer for Flex application. The service works just fine, but the end users would like for it to be more suggestive when they type in an address query. The main issue is that the geocoder does not return any search results until the entire road name has been entered. Our end users would like for it to return results even if only part of the road name is entered. I am having a hard time figuring out how to accomplish this because our reference data does not separate the road name components into individual fields like base name and suffix. All the street name information is contained in one field. I have adjusted the values for minimum match score, minimum candidate score, and spelling sensitivity, but these changes do not have the result that we are looking for.

Is returning search results based on a partial street entry something that can even be accomplished with the geocoding service, or does that type of functionality have to come from the application itself? I have seen java script applications that provide suggestive address searches, but I am not familiar with Flex at all and am unsure if that can be done.

Answer 1

After speaking with ESRI, I learned that having results returned from only a partial street name entry was not possible with a geocoding service in 10.2.2, but new functionality in ArcServer 10.3 does make this possible. This ESRI document lists the new suggestive option for address locators and geocoding services. Fortunately we are moving to 10.3 in the near future. Otherwise altering the Flex code would have been the solution to this problem.

Answer 2

I believe, in 10.3, you can easily get the suggestion feature by checking 'Enable suggestions' in the 'Create Address Locator' dialog box. This feature, as per ArcGIS help, "allows character-by-character auto-complete suggestions to be generated for user input in a client application. This capability facilitates the interactive search user experience by reducing the number of characters that need to be typed before a suggested match is obtained. The idea is that a client application can provide a list of suggestions which is updated with each character entered by a user until the place they are looking for is returned in the list."