Geocoding

Geocoding is finding an address on the map. To plan a route, we need to geographical coordinates of all destinations. Therefore all addresses are transformed to a position on the map.

External services

While it should be obvious that each address corresponds with only one position on the planet, in real life it's not that easy. Addresses may be wrong, wrongly spelled, not complete, or not recognized at all, i.e. when they are new or renamed.

That makes geocoding a difficult task, one that other services have specialized in. RouteXL makes use of those specialized geocoding services. You can use the powerful geocoding of Mapbox, Google, Bing, HERE, Photon and Nominatim. There is no good or bad, each geocoder has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Their performance may vary in various regions and with various address format styles.

Change settings

To improve geocoding, you can change these settings in the Options

• Select another preferred geocoder from the dropdown list.

• Fill out an address suffix, e.g. your country if you have addresses without country. The suffix will be added to all addresses before sending them to the geooding service.

• Enable precise address checking. You'll get a warning if an address did not provide a exact position, but an approximate, i.e. zip code area.

Testing

If you selected another geocoding service or added a suffix, you can test your settings using the search box. Fill out an address, or a part of it, and wait a few seconds. The search box autocompletion function will display a list of alternative addresses. If these do not appear, or the alternatives are wrong, try other settings for geocoding.