Search & Near Functions not working

[eastbayaa]

I have loaded some “test” events into my database and am checking various functionality before loading in my entire CSV import (we have over 500 recurring events), and it seems some of the front end search functionality is not working, or perhaps I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work.

I have an event taking place at venue “Triangle Fellowship” in Hayward, CA and I can clearly see this event in the front end if I search by date or just view a complete list of events, but when I enter “Triangle Fellowship” into the Search field, nothing comes up. Similarly when I enter “Hayward” into the Near field, it prompts me with a pull-down menu and I select “Hayward, CA” and nothing comes up.

Why is this not working?

[Barry]

Hi!

Sorry for any confusion.

At this time, searching via the Tribe Bar for data relating to venues will not pull any results (unless the search term is something both the event and venue post have in common). In other words, the event search relates purely to events and not to venues.

I can definitely see the attraction of a more holistic search pattern though and if you want to either post a new feature request or add your voice to any suitable existing requests we’ll certainly consider a change in this direction.

Does that clarify the current situation / are you referring to anything other than this?

[eastbayaa]

I’m sorry but that doesn’t make sense to me. Can you please clarify?

Let’s start with NEAR (or location):
If the location isn’t dictated by the venue, then what is it dictated by? Or in other words, what data fields is the “Near” field trying to match against? Or lastly, how do I associate a location with an event if not through the venue where it’s taking place?

Next is SEARCH:
The other filter field in the bar at the top is a straight Search field. So again, exactly what data fields is this searching against? Isn’t the venue name where the event is being held associated with that event?
Thanks for your help with this.

[Barry]

I can understand your confusion – I did misinterpret part of your question – and can definitely try to clarify things.

Let’s start with NEAR (or location):
If the location isn’t dictated by the venue, then what is it dictated by? Or in other words, what data fields is the “Near” field trying to match against? Or lastly, how do I associate a location with an event if not through the venue where it’s taking place?

Yes, this is matching events based on their association with a particular venue. I did misread your initial post with regards to this part of your query – apologies on that front – and if you could provide a URL where we can observe the problem (the one you shared when you opened the post doesn’t seem to take me to a live site) we can certainly take a more detailed look.

Next is SEARCH:
The other filter field in the bar at the top is a straight Search field. So again, exactly what data fields is this searching against? Isn’t the venue name where the event is being held associated with that event?
Thanks for your help with this.

This is really what I was referring to. This is a search which is conducted against event post types, rather than venues or organizers. Some good examples of searchable fields are the event title and the event content (or description): so if you search for keyword and that is indeed used in the description you ought to find that the corresponding event is listed in the search results.

However, if an event is associated with a venue which has keyword in its description, neither the event or the venue will be returned in the search results – unless of course the event itself also has keyword somewhere in its body.

Does that make more sense? Apologies once again for the initial misunderstanding.

[eastbayaa]

Hi Barry, thanks for your help with this. Ok, so I understand the SEARCH field. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on with the NEAR field, and I’d like to use the example I initially posted in my thread.
Here is the single event page for the event I referenced: http://69.195.124.167/~eastbbc2/meeting/came-to-believee-triangle-fellowship-wednesday/2014-03-12/

You can see that it’s in Hayward, CA and the Google map is displaying the location correctly. However when I search for events NEAR Hayward, CA it says “No results were found…”

Please let me know if you need more info or other examples to help resolve this. Thanks!

[Barry]

You can see that it’s in Hayward, CA and the Google map is displaying the location correctly. However when I search for events NEAR Hayward, CA it says “No results were found…”

Just to provide a little context, the map as shown on the single venue page is derived from the address.

By contrast in map view (though I appreciate you don’t have map view enabled at present) it is based on the longitude/latitude. I’d be interested to know, if you did enable map view, if a pinmarker shows in the Hayward area as this would indicate if longitude/latitude data was indeed created and stored for this location.

Assuming for the moment it does not, could you try editing the venue and re-saving to see if that causes the longitude/latitude to be captured?

[eastbayaa]

So you seem to figured out why… it does seem that there isn’t a correct longitude/latitude associated with the venue. I activated Map View and when it loads the region showing in the map frame is in Africa. All of our venues are in northern California and I defaulted country to United States.

I followed your advice and edited the Venue and then updated, but I can’t see the L/L fields and it appears this update did nothing because the NEAR search is still bringing up no results.

How can I resolve this and why did it happen in the first place? As I said, this was a small test import just to check out functionality and I want to be sure whatever problem occurred, does NOT happen when I do my real import with many more venues and hundreds of events. Thanks!

[Barry]

OK, well that gives us a better idea of what’s happening. To be clear, though, you will not be able to see the longitude/latitude fields in the venue editor: these fields are not exposed directly to users.

Can I ask you to navigate to Events → Settings → General → Map Settings and look for an entry just below map view distance unit labelled fix geolocation data: can you confirm if that is present and if hitting the button next to it resolves the issue?

Thanks!

[eastbayaa]

Hi Barry,
I checked and the field you asked me to look for “fix geolocation data” is not there. The only field under “map view distance” is “Google Maps default zoom level”.

I should tell you, and I’m sorry for not mentioning this sooner, that upon import I did receive some kind of error message saying that location data could not be found and did I want the system to fix this. I clicked YES. But clearly it didn’t work.

Again, I’d like to know how to resolve this before doing my massive final import. Thanks for your help with this!

[Barry]

OK –  I wonder if all the coordinates are somehow set to and stuck at 0,0 or if they just haven’t been created: would it be possible for you to export your venue data (via the Tools → Export admin screen) and share the resulting XML file as a private reply (you could upload it to Dropbox, some similar service or even your own WP site).

[eastbayaa]

This reply is private.

[eastbayaa]

Did you receive my private reply? Do you have everything you need to continue troubleshooting? I had hoped for a response this morning… I’m really looking to get this resolved quickly as I need to get moving on getting our new site fully implemented. Thanks.

[Barry]

It didn’t flag up for some reason (in my queue of forum threads) – but thanks for the follow-up and apologies for the delay and further inconvenience.

Longitude/latitude data is missing in every case there. I’m wondering if something in your hosting environment (this is not a problem people generally hit up against) is inhibiting communication with Google and stopping that information from being retrieved.

Can you (temporarily) add this snippet to your theme’s functions.php file, then visit an ordinary page and add ?geocode_test to the end of the URL, something like:

example.com/sample-page/?geocode_test

If it is successfully reaching Google we ought to get various bits of information coming back and that should display near the top of the page. Can you give that a go?

Thanks!

[eastbayaa]

I followed your instructions exactly and did not get any results. In other words the pages looked no different to me (no info at top). Here’s an example URL I tested: http://69.195.124.167/~eastbbc2/member-services/?geocode_test

And I confirmed the code is in the functions.php file in my theme folder.

Is there any possibility this ticket could be escalated for faster response time since it’s taking so long to resolve? Any chance your system works that way (that older tickets become higher priorities)? I hope so.

[eastbayaa]

PS – forgot to mention that my hosting is with Blue Host which is one of your recommended providers so not sure why hosting enviromment would be the issue.

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