[charlesmarshall]

sorry, i was getting the wrong end of the stick on that.

That is a good idea but your original point might be right, empty fields could be a bit strange. I'll give it a try and see how how it looks (probably not till the weekend - client work to do).

[ZeroGravitas]

Yeah, the interaction design is the hard bit and probably needs tested on "normal" people before you could be confident that it's actually helpful.

Maybe just having the autocomplete's available to save typing (and typos) and then only completing the rest of the form once you have the user enter enough that you're sure you can finish the rest of it (which sometimes might be the street, but other times the town/county) might work?

I've just realised that unless you know your data was 100% complete you'd not be able to do a guaranteed correct lookup from the post code and house number alone, since there may be clashes with houses on nearby streets you don't yet know about, and even if you present a dropdown list you still need a fallback form for new data entry. So that's a pretty tricky UI challenge regardless.

Do you have any example data that people can try to see how it works when your demo recognises postcodes?

[charlesmarshall]

Yes, from a front end point of view you can give the demo page a try - http://localyser.com/demo.html - using B1 1BB

Is that what you mean (still tired, shouldn't drink on school nights!)?

[ZeroGravitas]

What happens if someone else lives in "B1 1BB"? It's not obvious that they can click and then edit the current single entry that it returns.