You implement geospatial sorting by using geocode properties as sort keys.

Geocode properties represent latitude and longitude pairs to Oracle Commerce records.

Result sets that have geocode properties can be sorted by the distance of the values of the geocode properties to a given reference point. They can also be filtered (using the Nf parameter) by these same values.

For example, if the records of a particular data set represent individual books that a large vendor has for sale at a variety of locations, each book could be tagged with a geocode property (named Location) that holds the store location information for that particular book. Users could then filter result sets to see only books that are located within a given distance, and then sort those books so that the closest books display first.

A geocode property on an Oracle Commerce record may have more than one value. In this case, the MDEX Engine compares the query’s reference point to all geocode values on the record and returns the record with the closest distance to the reference point.