Small enhancement, a big thank you for the ASB Locations Search

It’s always nice to be appreciated. It may seem like a small thing, but a genuinely universal and user-friendly Location Search facility for our Anti-Social Behaviour Software, is surprisingly hard to build. The problem has always been the “non-postal addresses” like TESCO or The Playground or even non-recognised apartments like “Ground floor of….”. In HUBSolutions, we have been constantly improving these facilities over the years, because they matter. It is important that users can enter an address or location accurately, but equally important, that having done so, they can search and find it again, just as easily. Over the years we have introduced many innovations eg. Dual search fields, so that the user can enter the Block name or the Street name and both fields are searched at the same time, Free text searching so that the user can enter just a part of the address and list all the properties which include those characters, Sounds-Like searching, so that a user who is unsure how a street name is spelt can enter his best approximation and it will still appear and a free link to a National Address Database, so that the User could select a properly formatted address from anywhere in the UK. We also have Quick Search, where the user can input to just a single search field and the system decides whether it is a client’s Name or Address or Case Reference and finds all the matches.

But despite all of this innovation, we have found non-postal address to be a challenge. We used to have a separate search screen for our ASB Software, when non-residential locations were being entered, but this was never entirely ideal, when a resident’s address could be a non-postal address (sleeping rough or an unofficial conversion) and a non-postal address could be the name of a supermarket mega-store for which no-one knew or cared what the official postal address was.

After much experimenting, we have managed to combine the postal address and non-postal address into a single Address/Location Search screen, with both types of address being added to our Caseworks Gazetteer and linked to either Persons or Anti-Social Behaviour Incidents. It has certainly been appreciated at the first site to see the new facility - London Borough of Enfield. See the comment from a user below

Hello Peter

Thank you for the fixes.

People see the forms on the page but don’t see all the background programming that is necessary to service them.

Thank you for the rapid bug fix.

 All the best

David