Dynamics GP phone number international format

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Member

Is it possible for the databases to reflect the telephone format of their primary country? For example, the US designated databases would show (xxx)xxx-xxxx while the UK designated databases would show the most appropriate UK format. The only information I found on this suggests modifying the field using Modifier. Is there a better solution? Also we would only want this to apply to the UK companies.

Thanks!

*This post is locked for comments

I have the same question (0)

All responses (4)

Answers (0)

Tim Wappat 5,711 on at

Like (2)

Report

As you have discovered, you can change formats in Modifier, but this is not dynamic.

We sell to 90 countries quickly you find yourself in all kinds of internationalisation and localisation issues, address formats and telephone formats are among them.

I would recommend following E164 formattting, it will help you with auto skype or IP telephony calling some day in the future, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.164 when you start wanting to auto dial. However people are used to seeing phone numbers in local formats.

You could get a modification to GP to validate the telephone number formats as field validator rather than UI formatting them.

Another idea,

If you have two sets of users, say US office and UK office, you could serve different versions of the GP dictionaries to the clients, with the different types of formatting set by modifier, depending upon the user's AD profile or similar.

Others on here may have other ideas.

Tim.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

Beat Bucher GP Gee... 28,058 Moderator on at

Like (0)

Report

Hi Juliet,

Short answer is no.. The fields in GP where a Phone Number (of Fax) is used was coded to show off the standard North American numbers (10 digits + 4 digits for the extension).

Now this is only a formatting option, but the numbers are stored as a string in the tables as 20 chars.. which means they can accommodate way more than the standard US format.

The issue for you would be to change the formatting in the GP forms (or reports) to show off a new format based on European standards (or UK for the fact).

We do have several foreign companies in our GP setup, and yes the foreign numbers look ugly.. but there are just too many places in GP where the Phone number field is used and it would require way too much customization to accommodate the different countries (IE, South-Africa, Thailand, APAC & more, even South-America)..

PS; yes Modifier would be the tool to use.. and Tim's suggestions are a good starting point.. but it's going to be a lot of work..is if worth the effort ?

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Tim Wappat 5,711 on at

Like (1)

Report

Or take the formatting off completely for everyone and let users manually format them?

In the UK version of GP the formatting string is blank so we just have a free field to edit.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/developingfordynamicsgp/2010/11/11/changing-the-phone-number-format/

Below are screenshots of how our numbers look, manually formatted.

Beat is correct, really you don't want to be doing this as a modification as there are too many occurrences.

Tim.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Community Member on at

Like (0)

Report

Thank you everyone for the response

Was this reply helpful? Yes No