[thelist] international friendly form

Herzog, Ari Ari_Herzog at Instron.com
Wed Feb 7 11:52:31 CST 2001


-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Dyer [mailto:ben at imaginuity.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2001 11:16 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] international friendly form

>How on earth can we possibly change all of our forms (and I maintain
>hundreds of them) when something changes?  And where could we learn when
>this happens?
>
>I mean, yeah, it comes with the territory, but I can't possibly do all of
>this and I'm betting almost nobody else can either.  The only solution
*HAS*
>to be to make it generic.  Or to draw a line at making it generic.  But
>where do you draw that line?
>
>U.S.? Canada? Britain? France? Germany? Spain? Italy? Russia? Scandinavia?
>Japan? Bangladesh?

One idea is to make the forms dynamic, integrated with either a database or
some
call file somewhere. For instance, if you goto http://www.usps.com/ncsc,
you can fill in parts of an address to determine the ZIP+FOUR code.
I don't know how they do it, but I imagine it is databased.

So, even if forms aren't generic, as long as all of them have the crucial
elements which could change (countries, provinces/states, postal codes,
area codes) databased somehow, then if you change the database, the forms
will dynamically
change.

How else to do it? Sure, it may be alot of back-end work, but either it can
be created
with existing data, or other, but in the longterm would be a cinch to update
the form
contents.

-Ari




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