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Rebuild-Black-Business / RBB-Website

Website to help connect black-owned businesses with consumers and resources
https://www.rebuildblackbusiness.com/
MIT License
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Ensure efficiency in Google Places API calls #266

Closed magnificode closed 3 years ago

magnificode commented 4 years ago

The Context

As it stands, we are using the Google Places API to take in a location string (e.g "Atlanta, GA", "ATL", "Georgia" etc.) and convert it to latitude and longitude coordinates in order to return businesses that match the queried location.

https://github.com/Rebuild-Black-Business/RBB-Website/blob/main/src/api/geocode.js#L3

Our handleLocationToCoords function here ingests the queried string, and hands it off to the Google Places API which will return the closest matching lat/long values. This lat/long combo is used to search the RBB API and return results within a radius of that point.

https://github.com/Rebuild-Black-Business/RBB-Website/blob/main/src/templates/businesses.js#L78

On the businesses template, we leverage our handleLocationToCoords function by passing it the query string params that are appended to the search URL.

The Problem

The problem that we're facing is the potential redundancy in API calls to Google, which could end up getting costly down the line.

The Desired Solution

Make sure that the Google Place API is not being called in places where it's not being used (Home page, Allies, etc.)

mbifulco commented 4 years ago

Might be worth having a discussion with mapbox to see if they have a discounted/free plan for OSS Community projects - https://www.mapbox.com/community/

magnificode commented 3 years ago

Closing this out as it doesn't seem to be a trackable issue at the moment.