CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

I've made a directory listing for an Austrian association, and I noticed that in the profile list the Austrian states are displayed as number, e. g. Wien (Vienna) is  nr. 9.  For other countries there is an abbreviation of the state like HE for Hessen in Germany. So what's wrong here? In the table civicrm_state_province I found:

   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1628    Burgenland    1    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1629    Kärnten    2    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1630    Niederosterreich    3    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1631    Oberosterreich    4    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1632    Salzburg    5    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1633    Steiermark    6    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1634    Tirol    7    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1635    Vorarlberg    8    1014
   Bearbeiten    Löschen    1636    Wien    9    1014

Can I safely ovrride these 1 digit numbers? I looked for the table where the addresses are stored,  civicrm_address, apparently the states are stored in the field state_province_id as - in this case - 4 digit numbers. So is there any reason not to change these one digit numbers of Austria in the table?

Jens-Erik

Thanks. I'm just about file an issue. While searching if there's already a report on that issue, i came across this one http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-9353, where Donald explains that  the export is based on ISO-3166 abbreviations. And indeed for Austria there are 9 numbers for the 9 states (Bundesländer). I'm not an Austrian, but I guess, hardly anybody will understand these numbers as opposed to meaningful abbreviations e.g. for Germany or USA, so it doesn't make sense to put these numbers in the profile directory listing.

I think in the US the 2 letter abbreviations are widely used, but the German ones are hardly used in daily life in Germany, so not everybody might understand all of them, and for sure displaying numbers for Austrian states is impossible. So I think using meaningful abbreviations like listed in http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96sterreichische_Bundesl%C3%A4nder or the full name  would make much more sense for the directory listing.

So what is the purpose for using the ISO-3166 abbreviations? In the address table civicrm_address the field state_province_id uses 4 digit numbers  (id of civicrm_state_province).

Jens