[Lazarus] is the website down?

[John Meyer]

Hi Howard,

you said:
"I wasn't able to tell that the DisplayFormat property of dbgrid did 
anything at all. Is this documented anywhere?

And apparently, there is no EditFormat property at all. What I want to 
do is some rudimentary validation, e.g., make sure a zipcode is exacty 
five characters long and all characters are digits. How do I do that in 
a Lazarus/FPC dbgrid?"

you could use a try...except block to attempt to convert the number to 
an integer, this would tell if it is wrong, length could be achieved 
with length(inputstring) , it should also work with UTF-8 as numbers are 
a single byte subset of the UTF-8 encoding system, I wouldnt like to try 
it for text length on non latin text though
Why limit yourself to zip codes though, an application should have a 
more international appeal
A british postcode is like this B1 24NJ, CV21 3HB
If your using Zeos database components, specifically the table 
component, the field events onGetText & OnSetText could be a good place 
to do your checking

By having a mask field in the country table it should be possible to set 
the country first then match the postcode, this is the approach I am taking
I have extensive lists in MySql on ZIP codes, countries, province/state, 
cities etc. which I have no objection to sharing
I am also working on an address book project
Basically it is being designed with Lazarus 0.9.25 beta for the UTF-8 
support
Database is MySql using Zeos database components
The address lists are being built to show address information in dual 
language format, so China shows in English & Chinese, Israel in English 
& Hebrew
The real kicker though is in connecting it over the net to exchange 
non-personal address data with a central server
So if you enter the Hebrew translation for Tel-Aviv it will become 
available to all other users worldwide
I already have Chinese provinces in Chinese!
Thanks to US policy I have fairly complete lists on US postcodes & 
Cities but limited for other countries at the moment

I want to be able to print an envelope in 2 languages where appropriate 
& I want to do it when I can't even read the other language

I intend to also create a set of components to let others use this 
address book as a component within a project, for example accounts programs
I would of course welcome any help with this project
I personally dont intend to change from MySql as the database is already 
shared with web design code, having said that, I would welcome the 
ability to support differing database types within the application
You can find the lists of countries at 
http://comchatter.com/nlso/geodata.php, it is part of a much larger 
internationalization support project