Distance Searches

Distance search is used on the PeopleSearch and PeopleMatch pages.

To enable the Distance Search feature, a developer must populate the geocode table to map each postal code to its latitude and longitude.

Developer Guidelines:

1. Locate files containing postal codes, cities, states, latitude, and longitude for the countries to which your organization operates and download them. Many web sites offer these files for free or a small fee. You can also subscribe to a geocoder web service and create your own geocoded files. The key is to create a file containing postal code, city, state, country, latitude, and longitude in a CSV (spreadsheet) format.

2. Modify the file layout and AE process to populate the geocode table.

   • Modify the file layout RS_GEOCODE_CITY in Application Designer to match the layout and location of the file created in step one.

   • Open the RS_GEOCODE AE process in Application Designer.

   • Change the input file name and path to match the file downloaded from the internet.

   • Run the process to read the input file and insert the data into the RS_GEOCODE_CITY table.

Normally this only needs to run one time because city locations don’t normally change. It may be necessary to download and import a new file when new cities or postal codes are added to the geocode databases. The RS_GEOCODE_CITY table serves as input to the Search Framework index building processes as well as the location prompt tables.