Water Quality Customer Complaints - How to Break Down a Street Address

When it comes to tracking street addresses in a water quality customer complaint tracking software system, there are several pieces of information that become important. It is critical that you manage how the different portions of the actual street addresses are assembled.

Now, we are not talking about fields like City, State or ZIP. Nor are we going to consider the merits of tracking either GPS coordinates or even perhaps local map locations (A-2 or A-3). 

We will only be discussing the physical street address. The street address actually can have more pieces to it than you may think. In the typical "American" street address there are a minimum of five logical pieces. These pieces can be defined as:

• Street Number
• Optional Directional Prefix (North, South, East, West)
• Street Name
• Optional Directional Suffix (North, South, East, West)
• Street Type (ST, RD, AVE, ...)

This is the bare minimum of "street parts" if you will. In your geographical neck of the woods there could be more parts than the five described above.

In order to make sense of the parts above you need to envision a record creation screen. The Street Number field and the Street Name field would no doubt have to be a free text entry fields. However when it came to optionally selecting either a Directional Prefix and/or a Directional Suffix you could provide all available choices via drop downs. This way you could control how the Street Address is textually assembled. 

In this way you could eliminate the horrendously mismatched ad hoc naming conventions that always seem to creep into an address database:

• South Main
• S. Main
• So. Main
• S Main
• So Main

The same would hold true for your Street Type address part. You could pick a single value for "street" or "road", etc, to avoid the array of differences that would ordinarily creep into an address database:

• Street
• street
• St
• st
• St.
• st.
• ST
• ST.
• STE
• STE.
• Ste
• Ste.

By providing the three drop downs described and depicted above, you would ensure a consistent naming convention. Without a consistent naming convention, especially when it comes to the Directional Prefixes, all hopes of alpha sorting an address list go out the window.

With this design to ensure conformity you will have a consistent naming convention throughout your entire system.