Configuring geocoding

Configuring geocoding involves the following tasks:

  • Enabling your implementation of the GeocodePlugin plugin
  • Setting geocoding feature parameters
  • Scheduling the Geocode work queue
  • Configuring the number of Geocode batch processing workers

Enabling the Geocode plugin

By default, the base configuration GeocodePlugin plugin implementation uses the Bing Maps implementation. Guidewire disables this plugin in the base configuration. You must enable the geocode plugin before you can use the geocoding functionality. If you intend to use geocoding in multiple Guidewire applications, you must make these changes in each application separately.

Scheduling the Geocode plugin

By default, Guidewire does not schedule geocode batch processing in the base configuration. To schedule geocode batch processing, you need to uncomment the relevant section in file scheduler-config.xml. Guidewire recommends that you schedule the geocoding process to run during periods of minimal activity on the PolicyCenter servers.

Important: Schedule geocode batch processing for PolicyCenter and ContactManager with sufficient processing windows between runs to assure sufficient time for runs to fully process the work items in the work queues. If you find duplicate work items in the work queues for the same address ID, extend the interval between runs.

Configuring the number of geocoding batch processing workers

At the time you first start PolicyCenter, it is possible for your database to have many addresses to geocode, especially if you imported many new addresses into your production database. A large number of new addresses can cause the GeocodePlugin plugin implementation to take a long time to process these new addresses. Guidewire recommends that you configure the geocoding process with a sufficient number of worker instances before you start your production servers.

The default configuration specifies one worker instance. Worker instances pass addresses from the work queue to the GeocodePlugin plugin implementation. Consider increasing the number of worker instances to improve throughput. To further improve throughput, assign worker instances to run on multiple servers.