Questions · Addresses

How do I add address autocomplete to my form?

What the person filling in the form sees

They type “kalverstr” and see “Kalverstraat”, with the cities where that street exists; if they have already filled in the city, the suggestions narrow down to it. Once the street is chosen, they type the house number and the form tells them whether it exists: in the Netherlands it is street and house number that decide the postcode, and the postcode that arrives is the one for that number, in the form with the space, not a code from the neighbouring stretch of street.

On selection the street, postcode and city fields fill in with the record passed through the engine, the same one as the address verification. The database is born clean instead of being cleaned afterwards.

How it is charged

Per session, not per keystroke. The suggestion requests while typing are free; one operation is counted when the user selects the address and the fields fill in. If they then change the house number and select again in the same session, nothing is charged again. Each session allows up to thirty requests and lasts ten minutes. The price list is on the pricing page.

How it is integrated

Three pieces:

1. An API token, from your account area.
2. A small proxy on your server, a page that receives the request from the browser, adds the token and forwards it to our endpoint. It is needed because the token must never sit in the code that runs in the browser.
3. The widget ra-suggerisci.js, with no dependencies: you give it the address of the proxy and the selectors of the form fields, and it does the rest: it handles the pause while typing, the context of the fields already filled in and the filling on selection.

If you prefer to do it yourself, you call the endpoint /api/v1/suggest directly: a session identifier generated by the client, the text typed, the fields already known as context; then the selection action with the chosen street and the house number. It is all in the API documentation and in the OpenAPI specification.

Special cases

• Several countries: suggestions are available in every country whose address register is in service (the list); the form passes the country chosen by the user and the widget searches there, with the house number and postcode form of that country — the number before the street in France, after it in the Netherlands and Germany. The user can write everything in one field (“Kalverstraat 92 Amsterdam”): the answer says how it was read (parsed: street, house number, postcode). In a country without a register the answer says so and opens no session: the form goes on by hand, with nothing charged.
• WooCommerce and PrestaShop: nothing to write, there are the WooCommerce plugin and the PrestaShop module with autocomplete at checkout and verification of the orders.
• A street that does not appear: the user can always write the address in full; the record will go through verification later, from a file or from the API.
• Several forms, several sites: the same token serves all the forms; the proxy can sit on each site or be a single one.

What happens to the fields

The street is completed in its correct form, the city chosen among those that have that street, the postcode put in by the engine from street and house number and written in the Dutch form, with the space.