Scale Address Field

A utility Drupal extension that helps Drupal scale when unauthenticated users are presented with forms containing Address Fields. This extension requires no configuration.

Reasons to use this module

• If you present forms containing Address Fields to unauthenticated users and these forms generate a large amount of traffic, this module resolves the following symptoms, with which you may be painfully familiar:
  • An extremely large cache_form table,
  • Stability issues caused by database locks during cache_form deletes during cron runs,
  • Unreasonably high disk IOPS on your database container
• Beyond scalability wins, you might want to use this module because:
  • UX: It makes country selection / field swapping instantaneous!
  • It introduces a sane way to override address field labels, select options, etc.
  • It provides field-level validation for postal codes, including optional integration with Clientside Validation for friendlier validation in the browser.

Installation instructions

The best way to install this module is to use drush! You can do so using the following commands:

drush dl scale_addressfield
drush en scale_addressfield

Configuration and overrides

Scale Address Field offers two ways in which you can alter or override the way in which the address field dynamic country form widget is rendered.

Implementing hook_addressfield_config_pre_alter()

You can implement a simple alter to slightly modify the way in which fields are rendered. See scale_addressfield.api.php for full details.

/**
 * Implements hook_addressfield_config_pre_alter().
 */
function MY_MODULE_addressfield_config_pre_alter(&$config) {
  // You might want to update the label for the country field itself.
  // Note: Do not run these through t(), they are translated via i18n
  $config['label'] = 'Country/Region';

  // For full details on structure, see the default address configuration file,
  // located at json/addressfield.json.
}

See also hook_addressfield_config_post_alter() for altering configuration details after configuration localization and processing has occurred.

The scale_addressfield_config_json configuration

For more significant changes to address formats, you can provide an alternate default address field configuration file. Although there's no UI, it's as simple as setting a $conf setting in your settings.php file. For instance:

$conf['scale_addressfield_config_json'] = DRUPAL_ROOT . '/sites/all/libraries/my-addressfield-config.json';

The contents of my-addressfield-config.json should match the format of config/address-formats.json. For more details, see the addressfield.json project on GitHub.

Client-side reactions

There may be cases in which you wish to further customize the address field UX on the client-side, but wish to do so after jquery.addressfield and the configs associated with Scale Address Field have been initialized.

To do so, you can hang your customizations off of a custom event, triggered after all configurations have been loaded and applied:

(function($) {
  $(document).bind('scale_addressfield:initialized', function() {
    // Perform dependent customizations here.
  });
})(jQuery);

Client-side field validation

This module optionally integrates with Clientside Validation to display validation error messages on the client-side for postal codes (and other fields specified in the configuration).

Localization

This module utilizes i18n and i18n_string to localize end-user strings. You will need to download and enable i18n. All user-facing strings are available for translation under the "address field" group in the string translation UI.

A number of UI strings are also available for translation using the normal i18n mechanism provided by Drupal core for translating built-in interface strings.

Differences between versions

You may have noticed there are three versions. Which one should you use?

7.x-1.x (No longer supported)

• This branch focused on UX bugs; updating to Drupal 7.27 resolves most bugs that this version addressed (see the 1.x README for details).

7.x-2.x (Deprecated)

• This branch focused on website scalability, but used older versions of libs and dependencies (jquery.addressfield 0.x and addressfield.json 0.x).

7.x-3.x

• This branch solves the same problems as 2.x, but using the most up-to-date versions of jquery.addressfield and addressfield.json. This version is strongly recommended. If you use the 2.x series of this module and have made no customizations (via hooks, or custom address field configurations), you should be able to update with no issues.

Contributing

Be mindful that this extension is built on top of other open source software! If you find a bug in the integration of one of the following two projects with Drupal, you're in the right place. File an issue or pull request to the right. If you find an issue that relates specifically with one of the following, please open up an issue or pull request against the project itself.

jquery.addressfield

• Used for client-side interaction. Report bugs and open pull requests associated with this behavior here.

addressfield.json

• Used as the source for default address configuration. If you think a country's address format is not represented correctly, open a pull request here.