Incorrect forms for United Arab Emirates

[patrys]

We are running a large bookstore in UAE and tried to use requestAutocomplete however we have quickly discovered that the addresses it provides for UAE are useless.

A valid shipping address within Emirates has to contain at the very least:

• First name and last name
• PO BOX number (postcode equivalent)
• Emirate name (state equivalent)

Address lines and city are useful but usually not required. The addressing system in Emirates is virtually nonexistent. Most places don't have a formal street address and most deliveries are made to PO boxes.

[lararennie]

Hi,

The UAE postal union said that "emirate name" is not part of the format,
it should be a city instead (which in many cases is the same), so we follow
that convention.

The "address lines" are supposed to be the place where a PO box would go -
or whatever the most specific part of the address is. We don't have a
specific "PO Box" label or field. If we added this, we could do it for
every country; but we'd have to have a nice UX solution for that. Depending
on what your exact problem is, maybe a tool-tip explaining this field
better would be sufficient? Or if you have the problem that we can't
suggest PO Boxes, you're right, this isn't possible to do for any country
because of lack of data.

Lara

2014-10-08 13:12 GMT+02:00 Patryk Zawadzki notifications@github.com:

We are running a large bookstore in UAE and tried to use
requestAutocomplete however we have quickly discovered that the addresses
it provides for UAE are useless.

A valid shipping address within Emirates has to contain at the very least:

• First name and last name
• PO BOX number (postcode equivalent)
• Emirate name (state equivalent)

Address lines and city are useful but usually not required. The addressing
system in Emirates is virtually nonexistent. Most places don't have a
formal street address and most deliveries are made to PO boxes.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#26.

[patrys]

No, our specific problem is that users are unable to provide addresses that would work with our payment gateways that all require both a numeric PO box number and an emirate name. Cities are not the same as emirates and mapping them to the corresponding emirate would require us to maintain a database of all cities in UAE with their mapping.

For PO boxes labelling the street address field better might be a solution. As mentioned above, having an actual street address in Emirates is pretty uncommon and users try to enter descriptive values such as nearby building names instead of giving a PO box.

[patrys]

Also see the official addressing guidelines: http://www.epg.gov.ae/epweb/_en/info.xhtml?viewing_article=article19

[roubert]

Hm, in Chrome, the first address line field is labelled "Street address":

https://chromium.googlesource.com/experimental/chromium/src/+/git-svn/chrome/app/address_input_strings.grdp

I guess that would be the reason why there seems to be no field in which to enter the PO Box, even though that's exactly what the address lines would be for, from the point-of-view of libaddressinput.

Information about how to file bugs with Chrome:
http://dev.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-guidelines

[patrys]

I can file a UI bug against Chrome but what about making Emirate a required field?

[lararennie]

I'll see if I can work out what our original source was; we collected
Emirate until ~Jan 2013 and then switched to city.

2014-10-08 13:50 GMT+02:00 Patryk Zawadzki notifications@github.com:

I can file a UI bug against Chrome but what about making Emirate a
required field?

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#26 (comment)
.

[lararennie]

Also, re the PO Box; given that it's so common in the UAE (and I'm sure in
a few other countries) we could potentially add it and just make it
configurable so people can show it if they want to.

2014-10-08 14:13 GMT+02:00 Lara Rennie lararennie@google.com:

I'll see if I can work out what our original source was; we collected
Emirate until ~Jan 2013 and then switched to city.

2014-10-08 13:50 GMT+02:00 Patryk Zawadzki notifications@github.com:

I can file a UI bug against Chrome but what about making Emirate a
required field?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#26 (comment)
.

[lararennie]

Okay, added Emirate back and added a drop-down for it: 84d7fcc

Not required yet, but will be later.

[bojanz]

Looking at two emirates in the dataset:
https://i18napis.appspot.com/address/data/AE/%D8%A7%D9%85%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%8A%D9%86
https://i18napis.appspot.com/address/data/AE/%D8%A5%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9%20%D8%B1%D8%A3%D8%B3%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AE%D9%8A%D9%85%D8%A9

The lnames for these two are "Umm Al Quwain" and "Ras al Khaimah". So the al is capitalized once, and not the other time. Maybe standardize both on "Umm al-Quwain" and "Ras al-Khaimah", according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:AE?