Geocoding and autofill

Most address lists arrive without coordinates, and a location without coordinates is invisible to the map, to area selection and to arrival detection. Geocoding closes that gap: during an import, a row with an address but no pin can have one derived for it.

When you import destinations or origins, every row that has no latitude and longitude is looked up by its address. If the lookup resolves, the coordinates are written onto the row and it imports pinned.

• Coordinates in your file are never overwritten. A row that already carries a latitude and longitude is skipped entirely — your surveyed pin always beats a derived one.
• The address is what is looked up. A row with no address line falls back to searching for the place by name, with its city, state and country appended for context.
• Derived coordinates are treated as a backfill on updates, so re-importing a file cannot quietly move a pin that someone has since corrected by hand.
• It is best-effort. A row that resolves to nothing still imports; it just arrives without a pin.

A street address is sent to a street geocoder; a bare name is sent to a place search. An address the street geocoder matches to nothing is retried as a place search on the same text, which is what rescues rows like "Al Quoz Industrial Depot, Dubai" that are a name pretending to be an address.

When the lookup returns several candidates, the regional fields on the row — city, state, country, postal code — are used to pick between them. A candidate matching the country and city beats one that matches neither, and among equals a rooftop-precision result beats a street-centroid one. Every result is labelled with how it was chosen:

Every auto-filled row carries a warning on its result — never an error, because the row imported successfully. The warning names the address the provider resolved to, the match quality, and which lookup produced it, so a pin that landed in the wrong city is visible in the report rather than a fortnight later on a map. Warnings do not stop an import; they are there to be skimmed.

Lookups are cached, which matters because they are billed. A resolved address is remembered for 30 days, so re-importing the same file — or importing the same depot on 200 rows — costs one lookup rather than 200. An address that resolves to nothing is remembered for a day only, because the usual cause is a typo in your file and a corrected row looks like a different address anyway.

If the provider reports a rate limit mid-run, auto-fill stops for the remaining rows of that import rather than retrying into an exhausted quota. Those rows still import, without pins — re-run the import later and the cache means the rows that already resolved are not paid for twice.

For a single record, the location picker in the destination and origin forms is faster than any import. It offers three modes:

• Search — type an address and choose from the suggestions. This is the one that also fills in the city, state, postal code and country fields below.
• Map — click to drop the marker, drag to nudge it. The right choice when the registered address and the actual gate are not the same place.
• Manual — type a latitude between -90 and 90 and a longitude between -180 and 180. For coordinates you already have from a survey or a GPS device.

A green confirmation strip shows the coordinates once they are set, so a form saved without a pin is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.