Hi, all. I've just started playing around with the OpenLayers Geocoder module to input locations, and one of its features is auto-filling-in address fields. You can read more about that in the announcement of OpenLayers.
Currently, however, OpenLayers Geocoder won't auto-fill-in address fields located in either location.module (#1030432) or addresses.module (#910308).
The documentation (in the form of that blog post) seems to suggest simply creating normal CCK text fields to hold the data (street, city, state, zip code, etc.).
Apart from there being no input checking (e.g. making sure the zip code field contains a valid zip code) or helpers (automatic listing of states or countries), I'm wondering if that's the best forward-compatible method. If a bunch of location data is entered into a handful of CCK text fields, and two years from now we want to migrate to another location or mapping method, won't having them in all of those different fields make things more difficult? And wouldn't having this information in this field restrict using that location data outside of OpenLayers-supported ways? (e.g. in views, views filters, faceted searching, etc.)
I'm new to OpenLayers, so maybe I'm just missing something. Are others using the auto-fill-in feature of OpenLayers Geocoding, or the Geo+Geocode module options? How are you storing your location data?
