Address formatting functionality

[Erik Huelsmann <..hidden..>]

Hi,

Currently, LSMB wants addresses to be entered in parts: Company name, address lines 1 and 2, postal code, city, state, country. This is fine, of course, from a database perspective.

However, it's not so fine from a perspective with businesses operating on a global scale anymore: one business can have clients all over the world, with each country having its own addressing scheme. E.g. The Netherlands uses:

<Addressee>

<Address>

<Postal code> <city>

<Country>

(No state!)

Whereas Great Britain seems to use

<Addressee>

<Address>

<City> <Postal code>

<Country>

Of course there are all the variations of having a person as a second addressee line and the suppression of address line 2 if it's empty and suppression of <country> if the country of the sender is the same as the country of the of the addressee.

My idea (driven by a request from Havard) is to associate address templates with countries (or maybe even country/state combinations). Every part of the application requiring the company's address would request that from a function which applies the template to the database fields, returning a simple (opaque) list of printable lines which can be printed in a letter head or on an envelope. That way, we don't need to develop intelligent templates which know about all the different variations of addressing methods -- and neither does the rest of the application.

Bye,

Erik.