When geocoding is used for Canadian addresses, postal code matching fails.

When geocoding is used for Canadian addresses, postal code matching fails.

Description: When creating a map with Canadian addresses, the user is unable to use the postal code as a geocoding table match because our geocoding tables only include the first three characters and not the full six character code.

Symptoms: Users will see an error similar to the following.

Geocoding Value Mismatch

Some geographic names are not positioned, since they do not exactly match names in the geocoding table.

Cause: We use a third party product for the geocoding tables. We only provide the tables that are free, and the full Canadian postal codes are not free.

Resolution: There are a couple of options available to address this issue. Users can work directly with third party software to get full tables, or work with another source, such as GeoPostcodes (http://www.geopostcodes.com/Canada) in order to build their own Canadian postal codes geocoding table. These options are not handled by Tibco Technical Support. The user would need to work with Tibco Professional Services Group (PSG) to build this custom code. One other option is to configure Spotfire to only send the first three characters of the postal code to get a match, however that will be less accurately located on the map. Use an expression similar to:

left([PostalCode],3)

when setting up the geocoding column matches.

Keywords: Canada, postal codes, geocoding, GeoPostcodes, left