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CRM 2011 Address Validation with County Data

Post Author: Joe D365 |

PowerObjects has been implementing address validation by integrating to various web services for long time. We have had a need to implement county data as well, but most of the free web services do not return county information. So if we have a FIPS-list, or county/zip code list in-house, how can we integrate that to existing address validation? Today we'll take a look at CRM 2011 address validation with county data.

Here is what we did in one implementation:

First we created a CRM entity for counties and used the out of the box CRM data import to import the counties in:

CRM 2011 Address Validation

Brief re-cap on how our address validation works. We trigger the web service call on address change, usually on street 1, city and zip. Naturally depending on data we may get various levels of returns.

  • Address may be fully validated: house number and street is found in database
  • Address is validated to street/zip but house number was not found.
  • Zip Code was found.

In most implementations, we also keep latitude and longitude updated based on the address and can show locations in maps. In this particular implementation, latitude and longitude was not needed.

Since databases are at flux and many users have to accept partial addresses, we give users the power to ultimately decide whether the address is changed to validated address or not.

For example: Key just a zip code, address validation will find city, state and zip based on that.

After address has been accepted by user, we have OData retrieve against county data triggering asynchronously, and will look for any counties matching the zip code. If only one match found, it will be filled in to county lookup. Note, the county is set here as lookup in order to show county as county name, yet gain access to FIPS code which is stored in the county entity.

Obviously entering more information will give you better results, for example entering street number and partial street: Address validation will find correct spelling of the street in addition to the state/city/zip9.

Now, it is possible that some zip codes span 2 or more counties and we need to give user power to select from list of possible counties. If our OData query finds multiple matches, we automatically trigger pre-filtered lookup window prompting user to select which county they want to use.

End Result:

Easy data entry with correct and uniform address data and minimizing chances for user errors = Happy Customer!

We hope that by providing this information we can help someone a little farther down the path to greater business productivity with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. If you want to work with the team that is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Experts – please contact us at PowerObjects.

Happy CRM'ing

Joe CRM
By Joe D365
Joe D365 is a Microsoft Dynamics 365 superhero who runs on pure Dynamics adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe D365’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics 365 and bring the application to more businesses and organizations around the world.

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