It's working as well as mapping/database information allows for me now. A small anomaly is that the direct distance is further than the road distance by 2 metres, but is probably not worth meddling with.
I think I must live in the Twiglet Zone! My direct distance is still further than the road distance but they are, now, of the right order of magnitude
I'm sorry but I really dont think I can take this any further the anolmality is probably due to the fact that Im now using a hyrid of both postal codes and long&lats to try and improve accuracy down to as much as google maps allows. With Postcodes it is always going to cover a particular area and therefore there inaccuracies are going to occur because of the midpoint range. I cant take the postcode bit out all together though obviously since thats what its working off.
I tried coding it completely off google long and lat API but that seemed to only through more problems, in the end the most accurate I could get was based off a postcode which was then converted to long and lat then which does the calculation for the driving distance.
Normally this does provide the most accurate solution (the exchange is returned as a long lat co-ord) that you can do when youre going off postcode input for the other address. The google API has 2 interfaces and Im having to access them both to be able to get out the info I can. like I say normally it wouldnt matter but if someone is practically next door to the exchange then I think it cant pin-point it to within a certain no of meters. Im just over 200m and it seems to work and I know its no consolation to you because it looks odd... but if you really are very close to the exchange then I am tied by the info that the google driving distrance calculates and there could be differences of a few meters that do show up when youre so close to the exchange. :/
If I went back to just all post-codes (it is actually the easiest solution for coding), but it terms of overall output it gives the least accuracy, hence the hybrid.
The only real solution could possibly be requesting the user to input their full address inc house number into the checker and seeing how google coped with that, but at the end of the day Im still going to be totally reliant on the info that google maps returns.
At at some point in the future I may think about requesting a full address, but the other thing I do have to bear in mind is that the more info I request from the API, then the more it seems to slow things down before the results page appears.. Ive already noticed that sometimes it can be slow (it gathers the info from a few different of sources) and Im a bit hesitant (read lazy
) at changing things again :/
