Phone number and postal code formats should be made more flexible to support international standards.
by: Skip H. | over a year ago | 6 - General Enhancements
Votes
59
Increase flexibility of phone number and postal code formats
by: Skip H. | over a year ago | 6 - General Enhancements
Comments
The address printing format should be more flexible as well. The country code prints, but the country should print on the last line of the address according to USPS requirements.
Could set it by vendor group, or customer group! that way you could have several format masks.
Build into the phone number the ability to include the international dialing codes or provide a separate input block for them. For example: +44 GB or +866 China. The phone number in its current form is not large enough to place all the format options into the field for international formats.
I am trying to setup Germany. It has area codes that can be 2 to 5 digits and phone numbers that can be 3 to 7 digits and 8 digits on a PBX. It would seem that the best fix got Germany is to allow any format the user typed and not require a mask. This would help with intagration with startship with shippers that requier a delivery phone number.
It would be nice to address the USPS requirments as well.
This is critical for clients using countries like the UK. 7.4 has become even less flexible and allowing more than one mask for a country should be added immediately. I see the votes and the comments going back over a year ago so this should now be addressed.
I especially like the idea of including a country code box. We had to do this in customizer, but telephone number is on so many screens it was a pain to configure and something I feel should be stock by now.
Under consideration for a future release.
Make the phone field larger.
If the company has contacts in more that one country you seem to be limited with the phone format of country code of the companies main address for all contacts. With this you just can't enter a phone numbers.
Build into the phone number the ability to include the international
dialing codes or provide a separate input block for them. For example:
+44 GB or +866 China. The phone number in its current form is not large
enough to place all the format options into the field for international
formats.
Having the country code added as a seprate field would be a good way to know the correct format(s) for contacts.
Is there any way to not have the hyphen show after a Postal Code with only 5 digits? I know I'm being picky, but it's annoying the heck out of me. I can't seem to find a way to have it appear (in forms) only when there are the full nine characters and go away for the simple 5-digit codes. THANKS.
Can the drop down list for country codes on addresses be expanded to also show the country next to the code? This would help with countries whose codes are not immediately obvious. For example, ISO code for Switzerland is CH, Croatia is HR and there are several others that are not obvious.
Just want to call out specifically that the Postal Code Masking needs to be changed to allow for inclusion of multiple postal code formats for a single country. The United Kingdom (UK) for instance has several postal code configurations, but we are stuck with just one mask. This makes it next to impossible for us to properly set up a vendor or customer located in England unless that company happens to have a postal code with the same configuration of the mask that we set up. Please fix this!
A phone number can be up 17 characters unmasked (the mask is applied by UI and reports) but the txtPhoneMask text control in Set Up Countries and States is set to a max length of 17 which includes the mask characters. The postal code can be up to 9 characters but the control is set to max of 10, so same potential problem. The configurations for these values have been this way for at least 20 years and the issue is sourced in the fact that the table that stores these configurations, tsmCountry, was designed incorrectly. It is set at the same number of characters, 17 and 10 respectively. This obviously does not allow a full 17 character postal code to include formatting characters since each formatting character also takes up one of those spaces.
These are bugs since the mask is not applied to a value stored in the table (tciAddress, tciContact, etc.), it is applied separately. A workaround would be to apply no mask (just 9s and/or Ns) or minimize the formatting as you choose. There is also a more complicated workaround involving modifying schema, UI, the data dictionary and potentially reports. For country codes in phone numbers, you could use Customizer to rename the Ext. and use that for country code, up to 4 digits.
Multiple masks? Use no formatting in the setup and move conditional settings to reports, etc. The only way you might be able to figure that out is using an address validation or geolocation API that has the masking data and/or to add separate schema to contain the formatting for each address or group applied with whatever logic you decide.
The limitation on the dropdown for the country code is pretty interesting. The dropdown really should be a lookup, and the state/province should be as well, but that issue is a separate enhancement request. These could actually be switched to lookups with some creative Customizer code as a workaround. Also using CZ you could display a message or input box listing the values and names to help the user, and add a tooltip or separate text box to indicate the full country name, etc., etc.