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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    [Kde-pim] KABC Addresses
From:       Anders Lund <temp_and () tiscali ! dk>
Date:       2002-09-26 14:54:00
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Hi,

I think it would be a good idear if kabc provided a formatted version of 
adresses, some even in the filed lists:

Preferred Address (formatted)
Home Address (formatted)
Buissness Address (formatted)
...etc.

The address formatting method should of cause be smart enough to kill empty 
lines, for example if an address contained no postbox and that would have 
gone on a line of its own.
etc.

There is allready a method used in the adressee editor that formats an 
address, but we need a l10n aware address formatting method, so we can 
display addresses correctly according to their country. For example in 
Denmark, an address would be formatted like

Street Address
Zipcode Locality
[Country]

which is different from english or us english.

I don't know if it would be smart storing this information in the kde global 
l10n information, or it should be provate to kabc (I think the first).

What is required is defining an expression that can be used for the 
formatting. This should be quite simple, something like

"Postbox %Postbox" PURGE_NO_VALUE
%Street PURGE_NO_VALUE
%Locality", %ZipCode"
%Area PURGE_NO_VALUE
%CountryCode %Country PURGE_CURRENT_LOCATION

could be used, where the PURGE_<thing> would decide what to do in differrent 
situations (like PURGE_NO_VALUE means kill the line if no variables on it has 
a value, and PURGE_CURRENT_LOCATION means kill the line if this is the 
country we are currently in) and quoted strings binds additional text in the 
sting to the contained variable.

Having that, for example mail merging would work very nice, and non-us 
citizens wouldn't have to view wrongly formatted addresses all the time in 
any display. It would come in very handy for the card view as well, since the 
extensively long labels in address data steals space from values.

So my suggestion is, that we add the needed methods/data as soon as possible 
w/o creating BIC issues:
* a QString as_string() method in the Address object
* members in KABC::Field and KABC::Addressee
* address formatting information to (KABC local?) l10n database

-anders


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