Azure Maps: Understanding View vs. Routing Coordinates
When you work with Azure Maps long enough, you will eventually run into a subtle but important detail: the platform returns two different types of coordinates for the same address. And while they may look interchangeable, they behave very differently once you start routing, calculating travel times, or dropping pins on a map. Let’s break down what each represents and how to use them correctly when building location‑intelligent applications. Why Azure Maps Has More Than One Coordinate for a Place Geocoders, including Azure Maps, are designed to satisfy two competing needs: Show the place in the visually “accurate” spot on a map. Get people or goods to a real, accessible point on the road network. The coordinate that satisfies the first need is rarely the same answer for the second, in fact it can be wildly off. If you have ever visited a National Park or other large location where the entrance is far from where you would display the center of the park, you will note that the difference between these coordinates can be many miles apart and often you can't drive to the exact center, so we would say the View coordinate is not Routable. So Azure Maps provides them separately; one to power the visual map experience, the other to power the routing engine. The View Coordinate: Your Visual Anchor Point Think of the Azure Maps view coordinate as “the place where the map pin should sit.” It may come from an address parcel, a building footprint centroid, or a point-of-interest geometry. Azure Maps will provide whatever option that produces the most natural visual representation of the feature on the map. This is the important part for our topic: a view coordinate is not guaranteed to land on a road or even near one. It might be in the center of a large warehouse, deep inside a shopping mall footprint, or somewhere else that makes sense visually but is effectively unreachable from the road network. View coordinates are great for anything that involves visual context such as placing a point on the map, centering the map on a search result, running spatial clustering on data values, or doing proximity lookups. They’re simply not intended for navigation. The Routing Coordinate: Your Navigable Access Point Routing coordinates serve a very different purpose. Azure Maps generates them to represent an access point. The point where a vehicle, pedestrian, or cyclist can legally and realistically approach or leave the location from the road network. This usually means: The point is snapped to the closest routable road segment. It’s positioned where a driver or pedestrian can actually arrive (e.g., the driveway, street entrance, or legal access point). It includes the orientation and topology needed for the routing engine to produce correct ETAs, distance calculations, and directions. When you're calling Azure Maps Routing APIs—calculateRoute, routeRange, distance matrices, isochrones, multi‑itinerary optimization—you should always feed the routing coordinate into the engine. Feeding a view coordinate instead may cause the service to snap to the wrong part of the network, or worse, find no viable route at all. How Azure Maps Exposes These Coordinates Azure Maps surfaces routing coordinates and view coordinates through structured fields in its search and geocoding responses. The naming varies by API, but you will often see: "usageTypes": [ "Display" ] denotes position or displayPosition → View coordinate "usageTypes": [ "Route" ] denotes routePosition, accessPoint, or entryPoints → Routing coordinate Azure Maps provides both and should your scenario involve travel movement (even indirectly), the routing coordinate is the authoritative choice. What Goes Wrong When You Swap Them If you use a view coordinate for routing, you can be asking for routes that terminate inside a building footprint, on the wrong side of the street, or at an incorrect driveway. You might also see unexpected route endpoints because the routing engine is forced to snap the point to whichever road segment it thinks is closest, which might not be the correct one. On the other hand, if you use a routing coordinate for display, your pins may look "off" because the access point for an address could be far from the building’s center. This is why the distinction matters: one is about realism, the other about navigability. The Upside: Using Them Correctly in Your Applications When building an end‑to‑end Azure Maps experience, a good mental model is: Map UI? Use the view coordinate. Anything involving routing logic? Use the routing coordinate. That includes distance calculations, service‑area modeling, route planning, delivery optimization, pickup/drop-off flows, fleet operations, and anything else where “how the user gets there” matters just as much as “where it is.” With this separation of geocode results, you can trust Azure Maps to keep your visual experience clean while ensuring the routing engine has the precision it needs to get users where they actually need to go. To find out more about Azure Maps Geocoding and our new Azure Maps AutoComplete experience, check out Search for a location using Azure Maps Search services | Microsoft LearnWhy Upgrading to the Latest Azure Maps APIs Matters
At the Azure Maps Product Group, we work every day to provide you the best location and mapping solutions. Whether it’s through our developer-centric Azure Maps APIs or seamless integrations with low-code platforms like Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, our goal is to deliver accurate, reliable, and high-performance geospatial capabilities. All Azure Maps products are powered by our APIs, which are also available for developers to integrate into their own applications. To ensure you get the best experience, with the highest data quality and global coverage, we strongly recommend using the latest versions of the Azure Maps REST APIs. This is the same approach we follow for all our first-party integrations within Microsoft. You might wonder why upgrading to the latest API versions is so important. Let’s look at an example. One of the most widely used Azure Maps services is the Geocoder API. When we first launched version 1.0, it relied on a single data provider with basic AI-powered logic. While it served its purpose, the coverage and accuracy had room for improvement. Today, with the latest version (2025-01-01), we’ve taken geocoding to the next level by integrating multiple data providers, including TomTom, OpenStreetMap (OSM), and various regional and local sources. Our advanced AI-powered data fusion technology intelligently merges these datasets to provide superior accuracy, broader coverage, and an overall better geolocation experience. However, with these improvements, there are also some necessary changes. The newer versions of our APIs now return results using the industry-standard GeoJSON format. This makes it easier to visualize data on any map, including when using the Azure Maps Web Control, without requiring additional transformations. Older versions, such as Geocoder API 1.0, did not adhere to this standard. Fortunately, the differences are minimal, and updating to the latest version requires only a small effort for developers. In addition to our REST APIs, we also provide the Azure Maps Web Control, a powerful JavaScript-based client library that enables developers to build interactive mapping experiences in web applications. The Azure Maps Web Control has its own set of client APIs, which we regularly update to introduce new capabilities, enhance performance, and improve security. Staying up to date with the latest version ensures access to new features such as improved rendering, better integration with modern web frameworks, and optimizations for displaying large datasets. You can keep track of the latest improvements and updates by checking our release notes. Another key reason we introduce new API versions is to align with emerging industry standards and regulations. For instance, with the adoption of ISO 20022—a new standard for payment processing that includes structured address formats—we’ve updated our APIs to ensure compliance and make it easier for businesses to integrate with financial systems that follow these regulations. To help developers stay up to date, we provide a single reference page listing all the latest versions of our APIs, along with detailed documentation, migration guides, and best practices. You can find it here: Azure Maps REST API Documentation. By keeping your integration up to date with the latest Azure Maps APIs and Web Control, you not only gain access to the newest features and highest data quality but also ensure compliance with evolving standards—allowing you to build more powerful and future-proof location-based applications.Creating Custom Map Visualizations with Azure Maps
Azure Maps empowers businesses and developers by making it easy to create custom maps and interactive visualizations. Whether you’re using Power BI or integrating APIs directly into applications, Azure Maps simplifies each step—from data preparation to advanced customization. Its robust features, scalability, and superior support set it apart, enabling you to unlock deeper insights through the visualization of geospatial data
