Location Services

One of the big challenges facing this project is a detailed location service for finding jobs nearby and gathering needed skills from those results. This page discusses how that may be implemented although a lot more research will need to be done.

• Author: Alex Wilkes <adw4236@rit.edu>

Location Services

At the moment, the application simply matches zipcodes to determine location. While this is sufficient for a proof of concept, this application aims to be more than just that. Instead, the user should have the ability to enter a full address and find jobs that are close to them much like any other job acquisition platform does.

Frontend Considerations

The user experience is paramount when location is involved. The location search should have the ability to auto fill when the user allows a browser (or cellular device) to read their location. If it is not automatically filled, there should only be one search bar instead of having to fill out an entire form just for an address.

The search bar could take multiple formats of text and convert it to anything from an exact address, general zip code, or state and convert it into a location that is searchable.

When entering a location for a Job Posting (or course), it could provide some suggestions based on the location(s) that are associated with the organization in question. This would act as a dropdown that would have several options by default, but still be an input box that the user could type in to override any of the drop-down options.

There should be adequate input validation for all of these inputs relevant to the location services.

Backend Considerations

There will have to be some data structure that stores addresses in the backend and is used to transfer addresses to and from the frontend. This data structure will likely be dictated by whatever library that is chosen, but it must also support saving data in a NoSQL (and preferably SQL) database.

This location must also support online which can be shown as results to any user no matter the address they type in.

JobPostings themselves should likely maintain a reference to their location because it is likely an organization may have multiple sites or have a remote job. In this case we cannot guarantee that the location is an entry in the Organization itself. The organization location as mentioned above will likely just be a convenience for the user to allow some auto-filling.