Catch a Bad Delivery Address Before the Truck Leaves

A mistyped postal code looks harmless on an order screen. By the time anyone notices, a driver is standing in the wrong street with a planned route behind them. The cheapest moment to catch it is when the order is entered, while the person who knows the right address is still there.

We have two small endpoints for that. Neither needs anything in your Transportial account, and neither creates a location.

Check that an address exists

POST /location/geocode/validateAddressGeoReference takes a structured address:

{
  "type": "addressGeoReference",
  "street": "Weena",
  "houseNumber": "505",
  "postalCode": "3013 AL",
  "city": "Rotterdam",
  "country": "NL"
}

The answer has four fields, and two of them do the real work.

• valid is true when the address resolves to at least one place.
• partialMatch is true when only part of the input was matched.
• formattedAddress is the cleaned-up version of the address.
• latLonPointGeoReference holds the coordinates.

The second one is easy to miss, and it catches the most subtle errors. An address with a real city and a street that doesn't exist can still resolve to something, usually the city center. valid alone would pass that. partialMatch tells you to ask again.

A simple way to use it

At order entry, treat the three outcomes differently:

• Valid and a full match: accept it, and store the coordinates.
• Valid but a partial match: show formattedAddress and ask the user to confirm.
• Not valid: stop and ask for a correction.

Just the coordinates

If you only need a position, POST /location/geocode/addressGeoReference returns the coordinates for the same address model. One thing to handle: when nothing is found it returns 0,0, a point in the Atlantic Ocean. Treat that as no result, or use the validation endpoint, which says so outright.

Where the data comes from

Both endpoints use Google's geocoding behind one address model. Your platform's own key is used first if it has one. Coordinates from these calls can go straight into the vehicle routing and route calculation endpoints.

Try it

The location data page has the endpoints, and there is a short guide in our documentation.