[ic] postcode field in state database

[Mike Heins]

Quoting Jeff Fearn (jefffearn at gmail.com):
> Hi, I have been looking in to internationalising validation of
> postcodes and states. Is the states database used for anything? I have
> grepped through the code and not found anything using it.

Yes, it is used for tax in the core and for generating state select dropdowns
in the standard demo.

Coincidentally, I just committed a country_select Widget to CVS which
dynamically switches the state widget based on the country.

> 
> I am specifically interested in the current use of the postcode field
> in the state database. I have started using it to hold regular
> expressions to validate postcodes against. I did have to enlarge
> postcode to 32 chars to fit the Canadian re's.
> 
> i.e
> 00047	01	CA	ON	Ontario		[KLMNP]\d[A-Za-z] \d[A-Za-z]\d		
> 00328	02	AU	QLD	Queensland		[4|9]\d\d\d
> 00150	00	US	ME	Maine		ddddd(?:-?dddd)?
> 
> I then modified Order.pm to check the state & postcode using the modified table.
> 
> sub _multizip {
> 	my($ref,$var,$val) = @_;

[snip]

> 
> sub _multistate {
> 	my($ref,$var,$val) = @_;
[snip]

Good idea.

The way to do this is probably to use an OrderCheck code definition
instead of modifying Order.pm. (They take precedence over the ones
defined there.) If you make a compatible one, we can put this in
code/Ordercheck instead of in Order.pm (which is sort of the direction
we are going with this stuff anyway.

> 
> Can anyone see this breaking any exisiting or planned future use of
> the state.postcode field?

Not that I can see. Though I imagine one might think of using it for a
list of postcodes to populate a dropdown, I think a "zip" or "postcode"
table makes more sense there.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.765.647.1295  tollfree 800-949-1889 <mike at perusion.com>

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
-- Wernher Von Braun