Location based lookup

The site integrates with a Buckinghamshire Council geolocation API to determine what legacy council websites provide information for a user based on their address.

Buckinghamshire Council mapping tool

This is a tool hosted at maps.buckinghamshire.gov.uk, built by exporting from the council's gazetteer into a geospatial database.

No authentication is required to query this API.

This is used By the LocalAreaLinksBlock StreamField block to match a submitted postcode to one of the four areas of Buckinghamshire Council, matching those served by the former district councils. A postcode query returns a list of street addresses, and a corresponding 'District Council' parameter.

If all the results for a query match a single district council (most queries), we redirect the user to the correct site. Otherwise we ask the user to give their street address.

Configuration

The Python client is at bc.area_finder.client.BucksMapsClient. The timeout for the upstream API can be configured with the environment variable:

• BUCKS_MAPS_CLIENT_API_TIMEOUT_SECONDS (must be parsable as a float; defaults to 10)
• Retries are implemented to handle a Sentry ConnectionError see in production.
• backoff_factor: Increase in sleep time between retries (10%).
• status_forcelist: List of status codes to retry on.
• allowed_methods: Set of uppercased HTTP method verbs for retries.