Author Topic: Support for national postal schemes (Read 1039 times)

Ed van Velzen · August 28, 2011, 11:25:30 pm

I'm interested in integrating national postal number schemes into Civi's contact and address forms preferably by using webservices. Anyone any experience in this field?

Erik Hommel · August 29, 2011, 12:13:31 am

No experience, but we have an integration with Dutch postcode on our wishlist too. What webservices are you thinking of using, and how do you imagine CiviCRM should cope with all the installations?
While we are on the subject, I also want to make the street parsing options more international, and am thinking on a core solution for that. At the moment my thoughts are to enable the inclusion of a custom street parsing script (so parseAddress_NL) where the standard option is the default. Any ideas?
Erik

Donald Lobo · August 29, 2011, 12:17:36 am

Note that CiviCRM has integration with the USPS (US Postal service), BUT it is not used a lot (primarily because it is hard to get an account with USPS and they have lots of restrictions).

However we can base it on that code and improve it if needed to accomodate other webservices. Its pretty general

something that has come up in the recent past is to use yahoo! / google for address cleanup, since their mapping stuff does quite a good job with this (at least in the US)

lobo

Erik Hommel · August 29, 2011, 12:19:38 am

I know there is a USPS integration, but the integration De Goede Woning would like is different. On top of that, in The Netherlands data about postcodes are not readily and freely available, so in most cases you have to buy a webservice. I need to dive into the subject, and will do in the coming months.

Ed van Velzen · August 31, 2011, 05:21:10 am

I was thinking on using webservices like the ones from Cendris ( http://www.cendris.nl/webservices/ ). I would imagine that a hook would have to be build that wraps the webservice invocation which in itself would be different for each and every postalcode data provider (like Cendris). On top of that, national schemes require different behaviour like auto-filling street and city based on postalcode and housenumber or auto-filling the postalcode when the city, street en housenumber are known... All in all a challanging project?

Donald Lobo · August 31, 2011, 09:41:09 am

The address formatting (which is USPS only now) is based on a plugin architectuture. So you should be able to create the "address processor" for cendris and then get civicrm to use that one for your install. We might need to fix some code here to ensure that this happens, but most of this is already in place

We currently dont have things set to invoke a different processor based on data (i.e. the processor is site wide). If that is also an issue we could potentially consider that

lobo

Erik Hommel · August 31, 2011, 10:56:05 pm

Yes, my thoughts were creating something that would create a plugin for address formatting and postcode based on a plugin with extension based on country code. For the Dutch situation: I want to study on what BAG can potentially offer us, and if that could become a free webservice.

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Author Topic: Support for national postal schemes (Read 1039 times)

Ed van Velzen

Support for national postal schemes

Erik Hommel

Re: Support for national postal schemes

Donald Lobo

Re: Support for national postal schemes

Erik Hommel

Re: Support for national postal schemes

Ed van Velzen

Re: Support for national postal schemes

Donald Lobo

Re: Support for national postal schemes

Erik Hommel

Re: Support for national postal schemes