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Requirements for Location Data Sources

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IMPORTANT: MapPoint Web Service was retired on November 18, 2011. Please see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd877180.aspx for a list of current Bing Maps APIs.

Note

Numbers given below are in the U.S. format, where a comma separates thousands.

You can have a maximum of 25 location and polygon data sources on the MapPoint Web Service servers at a time. The location data source files that you upload to MapPoint must meet the following requirements:

  • File type Your file must be in one of the following formats:

    • Microsoft Office Access 2002 or Microsoft Office Access 2003 XML file with an embedded schema.

    • Delimited flat file where the first row defines the schema. Valid delimiters for a flat-file are commas, tabs, or pipes ( | ). You must use a single delimiter consistently throughout the file. In addition, all fields in the last column must contain values or the upload job will fail.

    Either file type can be compressed into ZIP (.zip) file format. If any values in the first row of data are not valid, the upload job will fail. If the values in the first row are valid, errors in subsequent rows will not cause an upload job to fail, but the invalid values will be either truncated or cleared. For more information about the file schema and format, see Formatting a Location Data Source.

  • File size Each data source must contain at least one entity, and the file cannot exceed 100 megabytes (MB).

  • Required columns Your data source file must contain Latitude and Longitude columns; however, these fields can be empty. If these fields contain entries for particular entities, the values are accepted as correct, and those entities are not geocoded as part of the upload process. Your data source file must also have an EntityID column that contains an integer identifier for each entity that is unique for that geometry type (polygon or point) in a particular environment (staging or production).

    Note

    If your data source does not have a Country/region column that contains values, the geocoder uses the MapPoint.World data source for geocoding and cannot geocode addresses to the street level. Also, note that the entry in the Country/region column for addresses in Puerto Rico should be PR.

  • Number of cells A data source can contain a maximum of 8.75 million searchable non-Boolean cells. This limit includes cells in the columns that are required (EntityID, Latitude, and Longitude) and cells in the columns that are added to the data source file by MapPoint during the uploading and geocoding processes (MatchCode, MatchedMethod, MatchedAddress, EditedLocationUTC, EditedPropertyUTC, and InputModified). The total does not include cells of type info and keyword. Therefore, the number of entities contained in a single location data source cannot exceed 972,222 (8.75 million cells divided by 9 non-Boolean, searchable properties per row). In addition, the number of Boolean fields for each entity is limited to 200.

See Also

Concepts

MapPoint Web Service Customer Data Sources
What is Geocoding?
Uploading a Data Source
Uploading a Data Source Using the Command Line
Uploading a Data Source Using the CSS