Issue with Location field and house number additions

Bugs & Issues
1

I’m running into an (breaking for our usage) issue with Fibery’s location field that relies on the Mapbox Geocoding API. It seems the api service used was switched recently?

When searching for a typical Dutch address like “Marco Polostraat 44 Amsterdam”, the results appear to be flattened. In Amsterdam (and in many other Dutch cities), a single building number can have multiple valid additions (e.g. 44-H, 44-1, 44-2). However, Mapbox only returns a single variant such as Marco Polostraat 44-1, while the others are missing.

This is the API call from my search within Fibery: https://api.mapbox.com/geocoding/v5/mapbox.places/Marco%20Polostraat%2044%20amsterdam.json

I checked the Mapbox documentation and found that secondary address / unit support is currently only available in the US. Outside of the US, sub-addresses are not recognized as separate features, and sometimes the API just echoes the input unit string but uses the parent building coordinates. This means Dutch sub-addresses (like 44-H or 44-2) are not properly supported by Mapbox Geocoding.

I understand it seems less like a bug in Fibery and more like a limitation of the Mapbox API. But since the location field in Fibery depends on Mapbox, this limitation has a big impact for users in the Netherlands (and probably many other countries) and especially for our way of using the field.

Ideally the Location field would show all available options:

  • Marco Polostraat 44
  • Marco Polostraat 44-H
  • Marco Polostraat 44-1
  • Marco Polostraat 44-2

Or without any addition:

  • Marco Polostraat 44

Before we used “Marco Polostraat 44” as the address, and manually added “H” into an extra field

2

There’s a workaround, but it isn’t pretty.

You can copy the location field, and paste it elsewhere, it will look like this:
{“longitude”:4.856766,“latitude”:52.36632,“fullAddress”:“Marco Polostraat 44-1, 1057 WR Amsterdam, Netherlands”,“addressParts”:{“address”:“Marco Polostraat”,“neighborhood”:“Hoofdweg”,“postcode”:“1057 WR”,“locality”:“West”,“place”:“Amsterdam”,“region”:“North Holland”,“country”:“Netherlands”}}

Then you can edit the “fullAddress” property say whatever you want, and paste it back into Fibery. It will then render the address as the new text you gave it, but still show the longitude and latitude of the old one. It’s not ideal, but could work in this case…?

I think Google Map’s API is better than Mapbox, could be a solution? Not sure.

2 Likes
3

I’ve had some workarounds for a while (addresses are weird), and even using an external api for Amsterdam-specific addresses (as we also need the neighborhood and locality fields to be correct)

I tweaked some stuff, and this field formula seems to be working during my quick tests:

ReplaceRegex(ReplaceRegex(FullAddress(Adres), ",.*$", ""), "-.*$", "")

This turns the following full addresses:

  • Marco Polostraat 44-1, 1057 WR Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Baffinstraat 2, 1057 SX Amsterdam, Netherlands

Into:

  • Marco Polostraat 44
  • Baffinstraat 2

The issue remains however, as this is confusing for our users in Fibery, as they have to interact with this field a lot

1 Like
4

Hi!

A possible direction we’re considering is extending the UI so that you can edit the fullAddress field directly (e.g. to add unit number, postcode, or other details). It’s a more advanced feature, but thanks to you we added it to the backlog and started collecting feedback. No eta for now, developer is working on permissions. mobile pa’s and unfortunately location field improvements are not planned at the moment (and it’s also is not a low-hanging fruit :smiling_face_with_tear:)

For now, we recommend applying the manual edit workaround like Ron suggested, and we’ll keep this on our radar to evaluate how many teams face the same challenge. :folded_hands:

2 Likes