Suitecrm: Why isn't Address Country a dropdown by default?

[GeorgeWL]

There's only a limited number of countries in the world and by being a textfield by default it causes the problem of UK, United Kingdom and the various misspellings appearing as separate entities in the data (which also applies to others of course.)

For data integrity wouldn't it make sense to have it behave as a drop down of all countries?

I'd suggest in the format of [Country Name (ISO 3166-1 Code)] or even to be fancy [Country Flag Icon
Country Name(Country ISO Code)]

for e.g.
United Kingdom (GB)

[chris001]

Agreed, activate the countries dropdown would be a sensible improvement for the app, to keep the country data clean and tidy.
The country dropdown list, countries_dom, is already shipping with the app, so, why not use it.
Code to use the country list was provided by Andrew McLauchlan @recci , 2.5 years ago, as a hand modification.
Why not make a pull request to add this to the core? Save a lot of time for a LOT of users.
https://suitecrm.com/suitecrm/blog/entry/convert-the-country-text-field-in-suitecrm-to-a-drop-down-list

[chris001]

In the same vein, there's an official list of all 249 legal ISO country codes on the planet, with their 2-letter ISO abbreviation, their 3-letter UN abbreviation, and their national dialing code prefix(es, Dominican Republic has three).
http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/ctycodes.htm
Once the user selects the country, if any phone number fields are blank, the app could autocomplete the country code part of the phone numbers.

[mattlorimer]

I agree it would be ideal to have a country dropdown, and it would be simple to add. However, the only issue with this is for upgrades, where the country field could have lots of various ways of naming a country in it, that if it doesn't exactly match the dropdown value it would be picked up. So we need to have nice way to handle this or to upgrade values somehow.

[chris001]

@mattlorimer Agreed. If the data type of the field stays the same, text, then existing entries would remain untouched, only new entries would autofill a preset text value based on user selected country.

Furthermore, there is the user experience issue, of, for many organizations, agents enter addresses where 80% or 90% or 99% of these addresses are from one country. So this dropdown should be smart enough to auto default to, for example, "UK", for crm instances that are constantly seeing new addresses added from the UK.

Or, for smarter address autofill, using google or any equivalent search engine, to intelligently autofill those text entries, by the interactive jquery calls going to google, from when the agent starts to type the address, all the agent has to do is enter the street, and select the correct full complete address out of the several suggestions returned by google. Province/state, country, and postal code are auto filled.

[chris001]

Ready to use csv file, complete list of country and dialing codes.
https://github.com/EspaceNetworks/CountryCodes/blob/master/espacenetworks%20country%20codes.csv

[GeorgeWL]

It really does seem a collosal oversight, as I can't think of a single reason a user wouldn't want to use a country from a dropdown by default.

[chris001]

Right, using available information to help the user with auto complete (as on smart devices with auto correct) is best.

[shogunpol]

@chris001 , will be great if you will try to handle an enhancement, and create PR so we can "fast" implement it.

[chris001]

@mattlorimer
@shogunpol
I believe there's a free google service which uses artificial intelligence to smart detect and correct addresses, which would be useful to upgrade existing data in the Country field, to an intelligent guess based on the rest of the address fields. Probably faster and more accurate at guessing the correct Country than any home grown solution, however at the rather high sacrifice price of permanent loss of data privacy.

[GeorgeWL]

@chris001
I feel address autocomplete should be a separate issue or even an attachable module.

Whereas this is merely an incorrectly implemented feature, as the solution to manually tweak it already exists, it just seems weird that the solution has been posted for two years by the main team on the suitecrm blog but not implemented into the main repo yet.

But yeah, it's troublesome to try and get the update to fix this in a way that keeps the old country field from causing problems.

[GeorgeWL]

could this be of some help? https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/redesigning-the-country-selector/

[chris001]

@GeorgeWL Definitely, this looks like the perfect upgrade for choosing the Country.
Unfortunately it's not on packagist.org
However, it's available here:
https://github.com/JamieAppleseed/selectToAutocomplete
Should add it soon.

[samus-aran]

Why isn't Address Country a dropdown by default?

[samus-aran]

We have now set up a new home for suggestions at Trello. All github issues that were labeled 'suggestion' have been moved and will be closed. Certain ones will be progressed within the new Suggestion Box and may be re-opened.

Announcement of moving Suggestions:
https://suitecrm.com/forum/suggestion-box/13691-moving-suggestions-from-github-to

New SuiteCRM Suggestion Box
https://trello.com/b/Ht7LbMqw/suitecrm-suggestion-box

[chris001]

This one also is more of a defect than a suggestion. While it's not a crash bug, it's certainly substandard when you compare with competing software, and makes users lives unnecessarily difficult, for such a simple fix. Not to mention, the enumeration of country names and codes is already included in the application, it was omitted from being used by mistake or lack of attention to detail, and it really should be used.

[samus-aran]

I get that, but we need to separate bugs from suggestions quite cleanly and this case, its a nice to have - may be it essential to have - but its not a bug. It will remain as a suggestion.

[GeorgeWL]

I'd say that it's not a "nice to have" it's an oversight, which makes it a bug.

[nzi200779]

Was this ever resolved?

[GeorgeWL]

No. of course it wasn't.

@samus-aran this is a bug, and it's not a nice-to-have.

It's a major oversight that's been ignored and makes the whole app look sub-par.

[tsmgeek]

2019 still not resolved? Ticket needs reopening

[GeorgeWL]

Re-open the ticket

[jgramp]

Has this been resolved yet?

[GeorgeWL]

I'd say that it's not a "nice to have" it's an oversight, which makes it a bug.

[pgorod]

@jgramp no, it hasn't. The Issue was only closed because we were moving suggestions to a different platform at the time. Anyway as you can see there are some vocal defenders of the need to add this feature. Are you thinking of contributing a solution? Thanks.

[pgorod]

George, how many times have you said that? We heard you. There's no point in repeating it. If you can offer to fix it, or to pay someone to fix it, then that would be quite helpful.