PROBLEM

No results are returned when geocoding a house address

Last Published: July 23, 2021

Description

When geocoding an address using a locator, no results are returned even when the house exists in the feature class that acts as the reference table for the locator. This can occur for New and Classic locators, as well as their corresponding geocoding services.

Cause

This is expected behavior. By default, most address locator styles and roles require a zone field to be included when searching for an address. Zone fields include city, state, and ZIP codes. If no zone fields are included when searching for an address, no results are returned by the locator or geocoding service.

Solution or Workaround

Both New and Classic locators have a property called "Match with no Zones". By default, this is set to "No". When this is enabled, it allows for users to search for an address without a zone field and still try to return a result. For example, while "380 New York St" does not return a result for a locator initially, but after switching "Match with no Zones" to "Yes", a result can be returned.
 
This property is also honored when publishing the locator as a geocoding service. Overwriting the service may be necessary to see the functionality applied to an existing service.
 
In the absence of a zone field, locators and geocoding services instead use the map extent to provide a rough approximation of where to search for results. This applies for the Portal and ArcGIS Online Map Viewer, Web AppBuilder applications, ArcMap data frames, and ArcGIS Pro maps. The map scale must be less than 1:500,000 for this to occur. Using the example above, searching for "380 New York St" when zoomed in to San Bernardino County may return the desired result, whereas searching for the same address with the extent fixed to all of North America may not.
 
This property is set to "No" by default to improve the accuracy of results. As such, if this property is set to "Yes", the results are sometimes unexpected. For best results, zone fields are recommended whenever possible in both locators and geocoding services.

Article ID: 000025652

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