If you have a text address and need to turn it into a geographic address it is quite simple.
You would need to have a data field of type Geographic Address on your Data Type (maybe ‘Retailer’).
If your text address is a complete address all in a single text element it is simple.
Create a workflow to ‘make changes to retailer’ for thing to change ‘do a search for retailer’ (set your constraints to find the retailer you want to convert the address of)
Then in the dialogue window, select the ‘Geographic Address’ make it equal to the ‘text address’
In the screen shot above the ‘Address-Geographic’ is the name of the data field that is of the type Geographic Address and ‘this retailer’ refers to the searched retailer in the ‘Thing to Change’ section. The ‘Address-Formatted’ is the text version of the complete address (complete includes the street number, street name, city, state, and zip — it can also include suite numbers, building numbers etc.)
The real reason for this post is so I don’t forget what I did for a trickier situation.
What if you don’t have the complete text version of the address as one complete data field and instead you have separate text fields for ‘street address’ ‘city’ ‘state’ and ‘zip’?
In that case you would want to do something like this
The ‘Result of step 1 Converted is empty’ is just some value that I knew would be empty so that I could get a value of ‘yes’ returned…then the formatted as text portion allows you to access the Rich Text Editor so that you can ‘combine’ the separate text address components together.
Notice that between each component I have a comma and a space.
I had to set this up to convert more than 5,000 address to geographic address using a recursive backend workflow.
When I first set it up I had simply used the ‘street address’ component to try and get the value for ‘Geographic Address’…sometimes it works out, but as there are chances that other cities in other states have the same street address, it doesn’t always work out correctly.
Had to scratch my brain a bit to figure how to ‘combine’ the separate text components since the Rich Text Editor is not available in the main dialogue for making changes to data.
