GEO_LOCATION and GEO_AREA

What is the difference between these two fields (GEO_LOCATION and GEO_AREA)  in the T_ADDRESS table?

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Sabina

Parents
  • geo_area is a foreign key to TR_GEO_AREA, and is traditionally maintained by LP_UPDATE_GEOAREA, which is called by a trigger on the T_ADDRESS table. Meaning, you can customize TR_GEO_AREA and LP_UPDATE_GEOAREA to better fit your organization's needs than the out-of-box functionality, and then use geo_area in list criteria.

    geo_location has a data type of geography, which is a "spatial data type" in SQL Server. According to the Table Structures document, this field is available purely for custom use. You can use a geography datatype to store geographic coordinates, so one way to leverage this would be to store the latitude and longitude of each address. We do this using a coarse-grained zip code coordinate data set that is publicly available, and then have a list criteria element that pulls addresses based on "mile radius from theater". Others have gotten fancier with this by queueing a public API for a mapping service to get much finer coordinates for each address — The Arsht Center presented a geocoder at TLCC 2019 that you can read about in the conference archive.

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  • geo_area is a foreign key to TR_GEO_AREA, and is traditionally maintained by LP_UPDATE_GEOAREA, which is called by a trigger on the T_ADDRESS table. Meaning, you can customize TR_GEO_AREA and LP_UPDATE_GEOAREA to better fit your organization's needs than the out-of-box functionality, and then use geo_area in list criteria.

    geo_location has a data type of geography, which is a "spatial data type" in SQL Server. According to the Table Structures document, this field is available purely for custom use. You can use a geography datatype to store geographic coordinates, so one way to leverage this would be to store the latitude and longitude of each address. We do this using a coarse-grained zip code coordinate data set that is publicly available, and then have a list criteria element that pulls addresses based on "mile radius from theater". Others have gotten fancier with this by queueing a public API for a mapping service to get much finer coordinates for each address — The Arsht Center presented a geocoder at TLCC 2019 that you can read about in the conference archive.

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