About the Postal Code Look-Up Attributes

Aptify's Postal Code look-up functionality applies to all entity fields that have an Extended Type set to ZipCode, such as the Addresses service's Postal Code field. (See Administering Entities for more information on entity fields and the Extended Type property.)

The Postal Codes service includes five attributes that control the behavior of the Postal Code look-up functionality. An administrator can configure these attributes as necessary to modify the Postal Code look-up behavior for an organization.

• OverrideCountryOnMatch: When set to True, this will change the address's country if the Country associated with the retrieved Postal Code is different from the address's current value. For example, if Country is set to United States and you enter a Canadian Postal Code, the system will automatically change the Country to Canada and populate the record's City, State, and County fields accordingly.
  

  • When set to False, the system retrieves a Postal Code only if its associated Country matches the address's current Country value. For example, if the Country is set to United States and you enter a Canadian Postal Code, the system will not automatically populate any fields since it could not find a matching ZIP Code in the United States.

    The country-based look-up functionality described above is only available when Postal Code information for more than one country exists in the Postal Codes service. The standard data provided by Aptify includes only U.S. ZIP Codes. It does not include Canadian or other international Postal Codes.

    
    
    

• DisplayMultipleResultsGUI: When set to True (the default setting), the system displays a pop-up selection box if there are multiple matches for the entered Postal Code. For example, if you enter 2000 in a Postal Code field, a pop-up box appears that lists 20001 to 20009.
  
  • When set to False, the system does not display the pop-up box. Instead, it completes the Postal Code, City, State, and County fields using data from the first matching record. For example, if you enter 2000 in the Postal Code field, 20001 will appear in the Postal Code field.
    
    
• AllowPartialMatch: When set to True (the default setting), the system looks for partial Postal Code matches. When set to False, the system looks only for exact matches. When this attribute is set to False, the system will not display the pop-up selection box even if DisplayMultipleResultsGUI is set to True.
  
  
• MinimumLookupCharacters: This attribute specifies the minimum number of characters that must be entered in a Postal Code field to begin the look-up process. By default, it is set to 4. Aptify recommends that you do not set this attribute to a value less than 4.
  
  • Using fewer search characters will increase the number of partial matches that are returned by the process, which can have a negative impact on system performance since the system will load all of the partial matches into the Multiple Results pop-up box.
    
    
• MaximumLookupCharacters:This attribute specifies the maximum number of characters that the system will use to locate matching Postal Codes in the database. By default, it is set to 5. This attribute must be set to 5 in order to support ZIP+4 codes in the United States.