Hi,
On 05/07/2012 06:10 PM, Chris Travers wrote:
Hi;
Structure is an important problem with addresses generally. We
think of addresses as being structured and they are, but they
aren't structured the same way everywhere. Consider the
Nicaraguan addressing system, for example, where you have no
street names and instead reference places relative to landmarks
and directions (and some directions are location-dependent, like
"El Calvario 1c al lago 1/2c Abajo" (i..e start at El Calvario, go
one block towards the lake, and 1/2 block down, i.e. West). Also
in Ecuador you have cross streets (1889 Manosca #105 y Occidental,
Occidental here is the nearest cross-street) as a part of a
well-formed address.
(I wasn't sure about the Nicaraguan address problem until I
checked web sites of restaurants in Nicaragua for their
addresses. See the address at the bottom of http://www.restaurantedoncandido.com/).
In general these pose problems as I see it. The simple way to
address this is just to put the whole address in a text field
except for the country. Of course if you do this it becomes hard
to do reporting on this by post code or city, or province/state.
This is part of the reason why we adopted the idea of three
free-form lines along with city, province, post-code, and
country. As I understand it xNAL allows this sort of structure,
and I'd prefer to keep it simple (take a look at some of the
examples).
Of course these areas are not ordered the same way in different
places so I think the key question is on formatting of the fields
we use at this point.
http://drupalcode.org/project/addressfield.git/blob/refs/heads/7.x-1.x:/plugins/format/address.inc
... That's how Drupal's addressfield is handling it. Looks like
really only 2 free-form lines, stored as "thoroughfare" and
"premise", and then city, state, postal code, country stored in
fairly consistent fields.
Addressfield is starting with a default layout, and then for a
particular list of countries, changing the sequence and/or hiding
postal code, city, state to match local conventions.
I'm sure that's not a complete list of particular country
exceptions, but it looks like they're just doing a brute-force
rearrangement/hiding of fields based on the local specifics that
have been reported... And seems like a great place to start for
LSMB...
Hmm. I also see an example module for extending the validation, with
a complete city/canton/postal code validation routine for
Switzerland...
Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com
|