CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This has come up before but never went anywhere. There is a sponsor willing to contribute some of the money for this e.g. via make-it-happen if anyone else is interested and can chip in.

Here is the proposal:

Add a new option value "Phone format". Prepopulate the default install with some common formats for various locales and allow an admin to add/edit/delete. The "value" field would be a regular expression specifying the allowed format(s). I know some people don't like regexes but in this case these are all just variations of "\d" and it avoids having to create a new language and automatically supports multiple formats at once.

In the administration section, maybe under localization or preferences, there would be a field to select the phone format you want from the list of option values. The default is no validation.

On save, the system checks that setting and presents an error message if it doesn't validate.

Similarly for import, the system would check against the config and generate an error entry as it does for other errors during import.

Possible add-on if funds permit:
Custom search to use the config setting to locate existing contacts with invalid phones, which would then automatically support a batch-update via profile action.

Out of scope:
Custom fields of type "phone". However, it makes sense to expose the validation functions in a way that doesn't prevent re-using them later for this.

If this happens and does get into core, please please please retain an option for no validation. There will always be surprising phone number requirements or idiosyncratic set ups where nothing works better than slipping a little cheeky snippet of text into a phone number field: for example, for differentiating a European Minister's Brussels number from their Strasbourg number from their constituency number from their office number from some other 5 'work' desk numbers they have of different types that are unique to their committees and position, or for storing the codes to save time navigating a torturous automated phone system, or for unusual desk extension number systems, or a quick note if a number is that of an unusual type of representative - for example, if a friendly celebrity is contacted via the desk of an artists' manager rather than an assistant or agency. That's a few off the top of my head - there's plenty more rare one-off cases like these that for some organisations wouldn't make sense to configure for.

Other CRM system have harsh validation forcing these tiny snippets of phone-number related info into separate notes that often aren't seen when they're needed - certainly for us, Civi's flexibility here was a major plus point.