Author Topic: Previous Addresses and how to handle them (Read 1137 times)

FrTommy · February 27, 2013, 08:05:53 pm

I have a suggestion on how to handle Previous addresses. I've seen it discussed a couple times on the board about how to deal with a contact's previous address. Most orgs like to keep a history of a contact's addresses. Currently it's not really intuitive how that can be accomplished easily.

I have a semi-work around that I use.
First I create a Location type called Previous. This shows up when adding a new address or editing an address. The next problem is if a contact has multiple previous addresses how to know what order they were in. I enabled the Address Name field and use this field to put the dates the address were used by the contact.

My suggestion is to implement a start date and end date fields associated with each address. This would allow Civi to sort the addresses in order by the dates.

If I were a better coder I'd do the patch myself but I am not skilled enough to do it.

What say ye?

petednz · February 28, 2013, 12:38:51 pm

Nice ideas - we have taken a similar approach for recording 'gone no address' though I don't think our logic on using it is quite complete, since it also requires us to then set this address to not be primary (ie to really reduce risk of something being sent to it) and hence keeping a default primary location for that contact with GNA in the street field (since we can't save an empty primary Location Type)

We also had a fix years ago for a client who needed to keep a history of all address changes - not sure if it is worth looking back at that to see if it could be pushed out as an extension. That client required it for 'internal legal' reasons as a person's location determined who/where they could vote - and needed to be able to prove that people weren't relocating in order to just vote somewhere - or at least, if they did, and a challenge ensued, the evidence was in the system of all such address changes. I think it kept the date too. Might try and get eileen to comment on here but she is pretty locked down with projects right now (well always but .....)

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Author Topic: Previous Addresses and how to handle them (Read 1137 times)

FrTommy

Previous Addresses and how to handle them

petednz

Re: Previous Addresses and how to handle them