Azure Maps Total Results at 100

Wesley Renaud 0

In Azure Maps when I perform a search/nearby request the total results field is never greater than 100.

1 answer

Michael Taylor 54,731 Reputation points

2024-06-26T14:10:07.3366667+00:00

You didn't specify how you're querying the data but if you're using the REST API then it, like most APIs that return sets of data, uses paging. Just a quick review of one of the search docs shows that the limit parameter (which is the max # of items to return) is defined to be between 1 and 100. Thus, at least for this API, you can only fetch 100 results at a time. If you need more then you need to query again using the previous paging information to fetch the next set of data.
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Wesley Renaud 0 Reputation points

2024-06-26T14:29:10.6233333+00:00

I'm using the search/nearby request of the REST API, and yes "limit" which is the number of results you can retrieve is capped at 100, but the request should also return the total number of results found (in the TotalResults field) which it does, but the value is always 100.

rbrundritt 18,591 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2024-06-26T15:34:06.9466667+00:00

This is by design and is done for performance. The total results in the response is 100, thus why TotalResults is set accordingly. In order to set that for the total available results, the backend would need to do the calculation for all POI rather than just looking for the first 100 that meet the search parameters and this would negatively impact performance. You can page through the results until the response has less than 100 results which would indicate there are no more results. This minor difference in how it works compared to how you are expecting makes a big difference in overall performance, especially when a service like this is called millions of times a day across all users of Azure Maps. Here is a code sample that pages through the results, but adds a max limit as well: https://samples.azuremaps.com/?search=poi&sample=load-pois-as-the-map-moves

Wesley Renaud 0 Reputation points

2024-06-26T17:01:09.4866667+00:00

I'm reviewing the sample code and I see that it uses the totalResults field to get the number of pages. That seems to contradict what you say about that field. Furthermore, when I try to use an offset of say 100 I receive no results which also implies that the totalResults field is accurate.

rbrundritt 18,591 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2024-06-27T16:52:35.54+00:00

Your right, I was describing more of how it currently works. Looking at some older code I do see that the totalResults used to show the actually total number of matches, even if it was beyond the top limit of 1000 results that can be returned. It definitely looks like something has changed at some point. Doing some testing, it appears this is happening within the TomTom APIs (the older Azure Maps search services wrap TomTom search APIs). I'll highlight this to the Azure Maps team so they can check with TomTom to find out the reason for the change.
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Azure Maps Total Results at 100

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