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Search an ID to get details on a place
When you know an identification number and the source it came from, you can use Mapzen Search to get details on the location.
To get started with a place search, you need a free, developer API key and these three pieces of information:
- source - the data source, such as OpenStreetMap
- layer - the type of place, such as a venue, address, country.
- id - the identification number of the item
If you have all of those, join them together with semicolon and pass them in with the ids parameter.
For example, this /place query looks up the Eiffel Tower in OSM:
https://search.mapzen.com/v1/place?api_key=search-XXXXXXX&ids=osm:venue:5013364
*** From Rhonda -- what are some examples of when you would use a /place search? When would you have this info and need to get the details? What would you do with it.***
Search for multiple places in a query
To search for more than one /place in a request, join multiple values together and separate them with a comma. For example, this /place query looks up the Eiffel Tower in OSM and 30 West 26th St, New York, NY in OpenAddresses:
The results are returned in the order requested.
From Rhonda -- is there another example where you might do multiple requests at the same time...in other words, more related locations?
Keep in mind that if you enter a source:layer:id combination that cannot be found, then the features array in the response contains a different number of elements than the number of requests. This will be most noticeable in requests with multiple IDs, as your request may have three IDs requested but only two results returned. The reason for this is that the features section of the response is GeoJSON-compliant and there is currently no way to convey an exception condition (not even an empty JSON element, {}). For this reason, if your application is dependent upon the results mapping directly to the individual input requests in order, then you'll have to do your own bookkeeping to handle exception conditions.
Valid combinations of place searches
Some combinations of sources and layers are valid while others are not. This table shows valid combinations.
| source | layers |
|---|---|
osm or openstreetmap |
venue, address |
oa or openaddresses |
address |
gn or geonames |
venue, address, neighbourhood, locality, county, region, country, coarse |
qs or quattroshapes |
neighbourhood, locality, county, region, country, coarse |