I have done some development and want you to share my current findings.
1. The MapElement copy constructor seems to have a bug. The attributes map which contains the city, region and country information is not copied. From my point of view this is an important thing that should be fixed in the trunk also.
2. In the patch the Locator is disabled as much as it was possible for me up to now.
3. I am using now separate tags (mkgmap:city, mkgmap:region etc.).
I recommend to run this patch with location-autofill=-1 or 0 to see how the patch works and not how the old Locator works. Some findings running your patch on Spain's map:
Thanks for having a look on it! It's still on heavy development and I am glad about ANY response!
1-The list of regions (state/country field) is much better than the one obtained with trunk. All those included are actual regions (some with two different names, e.g. Castilla la Mancha& Castilla-la Mancha). Trunk includes many names that are not actual regions of Spain, but provinces, cities or even villages.
That's fine! I don't understand why you get two different similar names. I think this is caused by addr: tags that don't use the same spelling like the boundary multipolygons. Do you know about any similar name detection algorithm? So something like a "sounds-like(String cityname)" function? This would be necessary to fix that.
2-The list of countries has grown from ESP (España), España (ESP) to Es, ESP (España), España (ESP), Gribraltar / United Kingdom, Spain, Territorial water of Ibiza and Territorial waters of Mallorca. Could we have some mechanism to unify all forms of a country in a single one, i.e. Es, ESP, España, Spain and Territorial water...->España? Maybe LocatorConfig.xml could/should do that.
Yes, fully agree. I have fixed that in my local code and it's working fine.
3-When the country field is filled in any of the search tabs, State/Province info is not taken into account.
Mmmh, could you also try that with the trunk? At the moment I have no idea why the autolocation could be the reason for this.
4-When searching for a street, city, region and country information is missing in the results list. Searching for a street+city doesn't work; street+(State/Province | Country) does work.
Aah, I tried to compile Spain and I got the same results. I have to look into it. Compiling of Germany was VERY fine. First result: some administrative boundaries seems to be not closed (e.g. http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/346488). Up to now the code works with closed boundaries only. This has to be improved. WanMil