Is there a way to mass update or ignore the lat/long coords of locations?

[jay7]

Page url: https://www.readyseal.com/find-a-store/

If you type in “Atlanta, GA” in the search box and search within 10 miles you’ll see some locations in Texas are appearing in the results.

It appears to be because it’s using the lat/long coords first, which are incorrect for the TX locations.

There are 2,883 locations in total. Is there a way mass update the lat/long coords, or force it to ignore them in favour of the address? Or a better solution? Or do we need to write a custom script to update/remove them?

Thanks

[Cici]

Hi Jay

I visited the site, I typed in the word Atlanta and three locations were returned all in Atlanta. I typed in GA, three different locations appeared all in Georgia. I even tried incognito and it still returned correctly, and random zip codes seemed to return correctly.

If I type in nothing and just select find locations  there are texas locations in results, assume you have your center map at or home default as texas?

If you do need to mass import to correct locations there are a couple of ways I would do it, but it requires the Power add-on.

You can export the SLP locations (as a csv file) then update the csv file, correct the lat/long or delete the locations that have the wrong lat long and let Goofle geocode them again.

You can then re-import. But be Careful, I would select to skip geocoding on the re-import or to Not duplicate or your API count towards geocoding will take a hit. (read the numerous news  articles about Google APi , geocoding tools, and pricing )

Also note, when you export the csv file, you will see a column called sl_id. It is a specific number that is associated with the specific location entry in your database.

See docs site for more info.

export csv file

 

Import csv files, header names,tips

[jay7]

Hey Cici,

Thank you. I think we are going to go with the Power addon.

I just had a couple more questions:

1. Do you know why the lat & longitude values for some of these locations were invalid? Is it because the plugin used the address instead of the lat & long values at some point?

2. Our client suggested deleting all the locations/accounts and have it update itself over night. Was this or is this an option? I believe if we did that we would lose all the locations and would have to restore a backup. Is that correct?

Thanks

[Cici]

Hi Jay,

1) I do not know why some lat long were invalid. Did that site have another plug-in importing at the time or were they all added manually? With that many locations it could have been anything and/or Google depending on when they added locations. Or if they transferred from another site and/or had a bad csv file with inaccurate zip codes or location addresses. BBad zip codes are more common with international (go figure since google is based in US and many other countries use only 4 numbers for postal codes) All latitude/longitude is added by Google API and although they can mess up at times, for the most part they would not have a lot of inaccurate, invalid locations. looking at the site and just viewing locations in Texas, it looks to me as if someone just copied and pasted, some locations are all caps for instance

2) He is talking about scheduled imports from a url, that is an option with power add-on but is he suggesting overnight because he thinks there will be less traffic to the site? . First, I hope you would have a full back up of their site and I would not do that on a live production site. It is advisable to only be experimenting and doing updates to environments on a staging site first. What if something went wrong in the middle of the update,i.e if they do not have a dedicated server or lose connectivity and only half were loaded. For the SLP plugin , no you would not need to restore from a back-up. But you are mentioning deleting all accounts? What do they mean by all accounts?

certainly some customers have done that in the past, but again, as mentioned do it on a staging or dev site and only after exporting all locations to a csv file.

P.S. I did notice one thing, may give you insight or not. I am guessing who ever set up the original site locations did it by importing from an excel file, did they ever have an add-on that did that? The reason i ask, if you search for 01886, which I know is the zip code for Westford MA, the results are returned correctly but they actually show the leading zero is dropped…the results are showing 1886. This is an improper formatting of a number and I used to see that a lot if converting an excel file to a csv file, it was converted as a number not text. So there is a good chance that there was some formatting issues that would have given back an invalid geocode or location

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Cici.

[jay7]

Hey Cici,

1. With regards to deleting locations (client uses term “account”), our client said “I have done this on individual accounts. I deleted the account in Store Locator that had the incorrect info and let the overnight sync add it back to the Store Locator.”

Is it possible to do this for all locations?

Thanks

[Cici]

I am confused by your customer saying he deleted an account or “location” and an auto synch added it back in, Umm ?? If you delete a location it is gone, it does not automatically “resynch” or re attach itself.

If you have Power add-on you can import remotely, is that what he means? And with premier they can schedule a geocode time ….

I really need your  SLP Plugin Environment to answer properly,  There is no way a location will automatically reappear in SLP with just WordPress synching so I am guessing you or they have some add-ons…or have a Multi site network ? with users, i,.e accounts,

The other information about importing properly  is in the docs site links I provided.

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