Migrate Autosuggest Requests

This section covers the actions that must be taken to migrate a Places API Autosuggest request to a GS7 Autosuggest request.

For more details about the types or specification of parameters, see the Developer Guide.

Base URL, Version, Resource

Query flow

Both Autosuggest Places API Entrypoint and Service are meant to support end users with suggestions while they are formulating a textual one box query.

Follow-up category and chain query suggestions returned by Places API Autosuggest Entrypoint through the href attribute can similarly be retrieved from Autosuggest Service through the href response element.

Places API applications retrieving Place Media Type details from Autosuggest entrypoint place or address results through the href attribute can retrieve those details on GS7 using the Lookup service with the id response element returned by the Autosuggest Service. Chapter Place Details describes how Place Media types attributes map to those of a GS7 Lookup result.

Query parameters

Autosuggest Media Type

Suggested Place or Location

Suggested Search Query

Suggested query term completion

Places API applications needing query term completions will find them GS7 Autosuggest queryTerms response element, separate from items. The maximum number of term completions need to be set in GS7 Autosuggest queries with a positive value smaller than 10 (default is 0). Check the Query term completion support chapter for more details.

Highlighting

Both Places API and GS7 provide highlighting information in the Autosuggest Entrypoint and Service. While Places API provides highlighting delimiter formatting (through hlStart and hlEnd), GS7 provides a more generic way to enable customers to render highlighting in their applications.

Places API allows customer to specify the start and end tag delimiter that should be placed before each matched token in the Autosuggest entrypoint. GS7 on the other hand, provides the start and end indices in the response elements matching to the query.

For instance a Places API application sending the Autosuggest query "Resta" with hlStart=<i>&hlEnd=</i> can expect to get a result titled "restaurants" with a highlightedTitle response element set to <i>resta</i>urant. Both matching and formating are integrated in the response element.

GS7 Autosuggest Service is expected to return for the very same query "Resta" a result item titled "restaurants" with a highlights response elements only specifying the positions in the title of the parts matching the query value:

highlights: {
      title: [
         {
            start: 0,
            end: 5
         }
      ]
   }

Application developers can easily build highlightedTitle and highlightedVicinity values like Places API is returning by using the value of GS7 title and the related information in highlights.

Place category system

GS7 supports the very precise HERE places categories, available in Places API through the cs=pds query parameter. Refer to the Category systems page for more details.

Currently not supported

Following query parameters or headers are currently not supported in GS7 Autosuggest service:

The following Places API attributes are currently not returned in GS7 Autosuggest service: