Addresses are a very personal thing. People get upset if
you change the way that they like to see their address
written. Despite this, you as a developer have to take a
stand and force addresses into a consistent format if you
are to stand any chance of processing them automatically.
Our format
We use the following layouts for all UK addresses:
Address1 C 30
Address2 C 30
Town C 30
County C 30
Postcode C 8
Restricting the size of the address may seem draconian but we've spent
fifteen years using this format. All our customers' addresses have been made to fit
it.
If you feel that you do need longer fields, think about
whether the extra text will fit on a label or be visible through a
window envelope. Standard Avery L7163 labels or DL window envelopes
will take the person's name plus these five lines in 10 point
Arial.
Don't even think of using 8 point Arial Narrow to fit more
characters and lines on the paper.
Our rules
We apply the following rules to keep entries consistent:
Omit all punctuation.
Address1 and Address2 are free-format but the Town, County,
and PostCode fields hold nothing but those values.
Abbreviate 'Road', 'Street', etc.
Omit the house name if there's a number as well.
Spell towns in upper case.
Spell counties in full.
Omit the county for county towns (eg Worcester, Warwick).
Omit the county for post towns (eg Bath, Coventry).
Omit country names within the UK.
Some of these rules date from the days when we produced label runs on a
dot matrix printer. We did everything we could to reduce the number of
characters to be printed. Every character that we could take out of
the address made the four hour print run just a little bit faster and
(what was more important) just a little bit quieter.
Other hints
Use meaningful field names. Generic names like 'Address1 .. 6' will
confuse you when you are coding.
Label every line of the address on the data entry form so that the user
knows what goes where.
Suppress blank lines when you are printing the address on labels
or letters. If you print blank lines then the user is tempted
to correct your 'mistake' by putting Town in the Address2 field
or Postcode in County.
Consider an addressing tool to give addresses from postcodes. We
use Quick Address from http://www.qas.com
Validate the postcode format - at least check that it's a valid combination
of upper-case letters and numerals.
The textbox class in Visual FoxPro 9 has a new Autocomplete
property which shows the user the previous values that have
been entered in that textbox.
Autocomplete in VFP 9
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