Dealing with Geo inconsistencies

[Scott Gray-2]

It seems like I regularly have to find ways to deal with geo (specifically countries) naming inconsistencies and I'm wondering if we could find a solution for it in OFBiz.

3rd party shipping gateways are a good example of this where they sometimes expect you to send a country name in place of a standardized geoCode, all seems fine until you realize that they accept no variations from what they have decided should be the standard name and those names don't match what OFBiz uses.  In my current situation we have to import address that come with free form country name and attempt to map them to the countries in OFBiz.

My only thought at this stage is to add an entity such as GeoAlias (pk = geoId, geoAliasTypeEnumId) which would form a many to one relationship with Geo and contain a geoName field for storing the alias.  The geoAliasTypeEnumId would serve to specify the purpose of the alias (e.g. importing or for designating a specific alias for outbound data).

GeoAlias
- geoId (pk)
- geoAliasTypeEnumId (pk)
- geoName

Thoughts?  Other ideas?

Thanks
Scott

HotWax Media
http://www.hotwaxmedia.com

[BJ Freeman]

just a plug for looking at addressing
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Extending+PostalAddress+Information
in normal addressing software, if you don't get and exact match you are
returned all the relevant address weighted by possibilities. Using this
would allow for updating addresses from known sources.

Another Scheme is to use contact mechs of the shipper party as well as
the customers contact mech.
the Idea about this scheme is that the look happens once.

however you idea is a good short term solution.


=========================
BJ Freeman
Strategic Power Office with Supplier Automation  <http://www.businessesnetwork.com/automation/viewforum.php?f=52>
Specialtymarket.com  <http://www.specialtymarket.com/>
Systems Integrator-- Glad to Assist

Chat  Y! messenger: bjfr33man

Scott Gray sent the following on 12/14/2010 8:50 PM:

> It seems like I regularly have to find ways to deal with geo (specifically countries) naming inconsistencies and I'm wondering if we could find a solution for it in OFBiz.
>
> 3rd party shipping gateways are a good example of this where they sometimes expect you to send a country name in place of a standardized geoCode, all seems fine until you realize that they accept no variations from what they have decided should be the standard name and those names don't match what OFBiz uses.  In my current situation we have to import address that come with free form country name and attempt to map them to the countries in OFBiz.
>
> My only thought at this stage is to add an entity such as GeoAlias (pk = geoId, geoAliasTypeEnumId) which would form a many to one relationship with Geo and contain a geoName field for storing the alias.  The geoAliasTypeEnumId would serve to specify the purpose of the alias (e.g. importing or for designating a specific alias for outbound data).
>
> GeoAlias
> - geoId (pk)
> - geoAliasTypeEnumId (pk)
> - geoName
>
> Thoughts?  Other ideas?
>
> Thanks
> Scott
>
> HotWax Media
> http://www.hotwaxmedia.com
>