Drewcorp Coding and Technology

CFMAP Issue Solved By The ColdFusion Jedi

Posted on 18 December 2009

I started creating a program for a good friend of mine about a month ago in my spare time. Essentially it’s a territory assignment program that assigns specific addresses in a territory to be called on by a field service agent. This territory would be then un-assigned when completed and the agent would move on to the next territory. As an added bonus and an experiment, I thought it would be nifty to actually SEE where the addresses were, instead of simply cranking out the addresses in an ugly list. The results were… inconsistent. Any more than a few addresses and I’d get a popup saying the address couldn’t be found. Normally I wouldn’t think anything of it, but the addresses were different every time the page generated. And ultimately I discovered that all of the addresses could be found.

After a bit of struggling, the first person I thought of who not only had the know-how to solve the problem, but also the inclination to do so, was Ray Camden whose articles I read often and I knew took on questions from readers.

I hadn’t realized that the first step in geocoding was translating addresses to latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Apparently if you send too many addresses to geolocate too close together, you get a 620 error from google maps and throws an error (or many errors).

Thanks again to Raymond Camden for his help, and here’s the article he wrote about it: http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/index.cfm/2009/12/15/Having-trouble-with-too-many-map-markers-and-CFMAP