Proximity search by city, or state, or ZIP

Question

For some reason we still don't have this feature yet. We can make it work using zip codes, but how about City or State? The Views set of Modules are great and I would love to see Proximity Search options expanded. There are requests for this in the Drupal forums: http://drupal.org/node/489904 but that thread has been stagnant for months. The "fix" is inconsistent and no longer works on my end, using Views and Location series modules. Does anyone know a workaround to this issue? The custom module shown in Drupal forum worked at some point with limitations, but now its no longer displaying any search results. Trying to hit this from any angle -- have the US zipcodes in MySQL database for the former configuration; have Apache SOLR ready to go; even got Spatial SOLR ready to go if that ever picks up. Any help much appreciated.

Answer 1

May be you have to try geoname module im not sure you should try

http://geonames.edesign.no/node/13

Give a try

Thanks, Gobi :)

Answer 2

I think one of the problems is city names are not necessarily unique. (zips are) You could have the same city in different states.

For states, it's even less reliable because their area can vary a great deal and proximity search around a state would be very unreliable for states which don't have circular shapes.

So the module should have an extra step showing "did you mean.." results in case there are more returned (if possible).

I don't believe there is a workaround, it will require some coding to implement this in views.

I would start in location.views.inc around line #493, adapting the logic for the current zipcode handler. Look for the location_latlon_rough function in location.inc.