Hello,
If most of your contacts are in your country I advise you to use a Global OptionSet that you can attach to any entity you want. Why ?
- Because, You can define your country as a Default Value for new contacts.
- Because, You can sort your coutries list A to Z and when you select your field on your contact form and you push a letter you find a top list of coutries qith name begins by this letter.
- Because, You can also put your frequently used countries on top of your OptionSet.
- Now you need to create a new OptionSet field on every entity that need to use this Global Option Set.
- Because, If your CRM is Multi-Language you can localize the countries names like this (United States of America (in English) > Etats Unis d'Amérique (in French)).
But if you are in a Mono-Language CRM and you have many contacts from many countries, in this case, I advise you to use a custom entity Country. Why ?
- Because you can add additional information like ISO Code 3, ISO Code 2, Continent (Africa, Europe ...) useful for reporting and any other operation.
- Because, you can use it as a lookup in any entity you want to use. And the lookup component allows you to keep history values alredy used and allows you also to filter countries by pushing a letter. It allow you the autocomplete of your country name if you put write Tuni and click on tab key the lookup knows that it's Tunisia and select it .
Now, if your choice is taken :
In the form, you have to hide standard country fields and to put the new one (Lookup or OptionSet).
For the former records you can export all of these records with the for re-import option checked in a excel file, open it and put manually the name of the country for lookup choice or the country id (the value of the OptionSet entry if your choice is the OptionSet). And reimport it.
I hope that you can make a choice now :)
Nizar JLASSI
