Capturing International Personal Data (Name, Address, Phone, etc) ASP.NET

Question

I am looking for the best way to capture and validate US & international personal data. I have to use ASP.NET 2.0 (vb.net) and no 3rd party web services. This are all client restrictions.

The main point of this is I have to toss their data to FedEx for a shipping quote. I think FedEx has a address checker but that web service was not approved in the scope of the project and its too late to get it added.

My current solution is to just let the field be required and free form then before I save their profile check to see if FedEx will return a quote. If it fails then I will ask them to recheck their profile or contact the admin.

Thanks, -- Sal

Answer 1

If you want to properly handle international data, in addition to loosening restrictions on the database field, I would make sure it is a unicode field. International data often includes characters not normally represented by ASCII, and even if you make the field free form, that might not be sufficient enough.