Address line composition

[Erik Huelsmann <..hidden..>]

Havard and I were thinking about adjustments we need to make to the address lines in an invoice in order to make the addressing "look more european". A "european" address would look like this:

COMPANY NAME

CONTACT PERSON NAME [if any]

ADDRESS LINE1

ADDRESS LINE2 [if any]

POSTCODE CITY

COUNTRY

When discussing through the case, we found that the address composition is incorrect when presented at the top of the order and invoice screens as well as on the printed invoices/orders. While we can somewhat fix the address issue on the printed versions, we can't immediately fix the screens - although doing so would be very nice. While going over our options - one of which was to adjust the the invoice template - I suddenly thought of one of my other companies which sends out international invoices to european and US customers. This company would benefit from both sets of formatting. However, solving that in the templates is not a good option.

So, I came up with the idea to create "address formatting templates": a way to associate address component placement with countries. Many european countries would use the format depicted above, but the UK would use a different format and so would the US. Maybe other parts of the world can use their own as well.

The resulting data would simply be "address lines" without specific meaning. Just data to be printed in the address section of an invoice or order.

The advantage of this approach is that it could be used to fix the data printed in the application as well as that it can be used to feed the correct data to the templates.

So, what's your response to this idea?

Bye,

Erik.