Intelligent Advisor

Hi @jakeashton

Well. essentially we are looking at two visions of the story if I read you correctly -

1. Storing the employee address data and validating this in your CX
2. Entering address information and validating it in OIA

In the case of (1)

If you can do it on the CX side, all well an good - either at point of data entry or upon update. So the correct data is passed to OIA via the Connector and no further action is required for OIA, the data is (in theory) correct. At most OIA might make it palatable by displaying a visual reference (a map or similar).

In the case of (2)

OIA is agnostic - it does not care what address validation tool you use - whether it be a REST API to your own GIS / address platform or a REST API to some third party service like the Swiss Post Office (I'm sorry but I realized I forgot to ask you for the target location) or even some public mapping tool for point and click. In all of these cases, the interview will have an extension that will allow the user to interact (type in a Postcode , to select a point,, type an address or whatever) and to get data back from the service.

In (1), the only work in the OIA interview would be to display the data in some nice way - Leaflet.JS, MapBox, Google Maps or whatever.

In (2) this would take the form typically of an interview extension, since this allows the interview designer to easily and securely call an external service and manage the responses before displaying them in the interview. The extension is JavaScript-based. The selection / choice of the user can be passed back to the CX as part of the data returned using the Connector.

It's a vast subject and of course as an OIA person I had rather the validation be done in the CX, so that OIA can concentrate on substantive business rules rather than communicating with an external service. But I've done both and obtained satisfaction in both scenarios.

For further reading, here are some suggestions. Note that these are provided simply to give you an idea of the sort of related things that can be achieved in custom extensions, not to provide a specific recommendation. All of them can be found on my company site , search for the following terms (I cannot post links).

Google Maps for Addresses and Reverse Geocoding

Geomapping with Leaflet JS

Custom JavaScript Extension Places and Custom Options List

In the above image, a geolocate is used to query Places API and to let the user select pick-up locations (in this case garages to pick up a spare part)

The example above is a simple Leaflet.JS and MapBox combination to display data retrieved from the CX in a pleasant format.

The final image above is lat/long to address and so on. I do have examples of ArcGIS integration for point and click but cannot share them since they are related to a specific project.

In addition, the wonderful Oracle OIA Blog team has a simple example here (I can post links to the Oracle site I believe) : https://blogs.oracle.com/ia/post/how-to-use-a-map-to-set-an-address-location-in-an-interview

Other more relevant examples can be found by looking for anything related to interview.fetch() since that is the mechanism for interrogating a REST API from within the interview experience.

Apologies if you knew all this before I started writing this, but I figured that the information will be of use to others who are reading this as well.

Richard