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Author Topic: Error in County reference data for Ireland  (Read 1399 times)

DaraghOBrien

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Error in County reference data for Ireland
March 30, 2009, 10:46:28 am
Hi,

I am configuring Civicrm as a pilot project for an Irish political organisation. I've noticed that you have appended an abbreviation of county names in the civicrm_county table that is a varchar(4) field.

this is WRONG for Ireland and Irish address data. Counties are abbreviated in our vehicle licensing database but are NOT abbreviated for postal addresses. One of the proposed postcode system approaches for Ireland does suggest using aspects of the vehicle licensing schema to form part of a postcode but there is no timescale for this project yet (Ireland doesn't have postcodes - technically Dublin uses postal districts which are a different thing)

Even within the abbreviated codes there are some errors. For example, County Tipperary is administratively subdivided into "Tipperary North Riding" and "Tipperary South Riding" so there are two vehicle license abbreviations for Tipperary - TN and TS, not TA as listed in your data.

I found where the information about the abbreviations came from (http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php?topic=5001.0) but the ISO abbreviations are not used in general mailing in Ireland. I've worked on commercial single view of customer and CRM database development projects for large companies in ireland and I've never actually seen it used.

One option I have is to hack the database to fix this issue (lengthen field and copy over the full county names) and would recommend that this might be a worthwhile fix. Are there any issues/dependencies on the field length I should be aware of before making this change?

An alternative fix would be to pull the full text of the state/province Name field for labels and display purposes, but that might affect label formats in more "standards compliant" countries.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2009, 11:19:56 am by DaraghOBrien »

Donald Lobo

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Re: Error in County reference data for Ireland
March 30, 2009, 12:33:21 pm

hey daragh:

your first statement says civicrm_county, your last statement talks about the state_province table.

Can u clarify which one you mean?

Also if we are talking of mailing labels, the tokens allow both name and abbreviation. from the help page (at: q=civicrm/admin/setting/preferences/address&reset=1)

{contact.state_province}   State or province abbreviation.
{contact.state_province_name}   State or province full name.

lobo
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DaraghOBrien

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Re: Error in County reference data for Ireland
March 31, 2009, 05:13:34 am
Lobo

Apologies, was writing the original post while juggling netbook on my knees on the bus. The table is the civicrm_state_province table.

I'll take a look at the config settings you suggest, but am concerned that that might make non-irish addresses look funny as well.

thanks for the quick response. It's service like that that has me recommending civicrm to ALL my friends ;-)

Donald Lobo

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Re: Error in County reference data for Ireland
March 31, 2009, 07:19:52 am

that is a site specific setting. But since this is an Irish political party org, i suspect that most addresses will be Irish?

unfortunately the label format is not dynamic and cannot be changed on a per address basis. If you need to do so, you'll have to tweak the code

lobo
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polestar

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Re: Error in County reference data for Ireland
March 31, 2009, 07:43:19 am
Hi Daragh,

You can avoid using the abbreviation in the addresses and just use names of counties.

This is what we did with our installations.
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DaraghOBrien

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Re: Error in County reference data for Ireland
April 02, 2009, 05:30:57 am
@Lobo

The actual uptake amongst countries of the ISO3166-2 standard for sub-divisions hasn't been a wonderful success, and a lot of countries don't use them in their postal system.

I'll check with a colleague of mine who actually wrote the book on postal address reference data and standards for global data management and see if he has any statistics. If the uptake has been significantly low I would suggest that perhaps the best option is to have the non-abbreviated version as the default with an option to use the abbreviated version. He might even have a mapping of which countries use the ISO codes and which don't.

Also - while this project is constrained within Ireland, the nature of Irish politics will inevitably mean that UK addresses will be included (Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom). Also, I'm working on another project for an international association and that data set has addresses from 16 different countries to contend with... but there's bigger issues with that data than just what the county/state field looks like on a label ;-)

Thanks again to you and to Polestar for the advice on sorting this out..
« Last Edit: April 02, 2009, 05:43:26 am by DaraghOBrien »
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