How-to use Location component

The Location component serves as a database of several countries and country states around the world. When you install this component it does a bootstrap from the Geo.xls file to the Country and CountryState entities in order to fill them with data.

Here are the  entities attributes:

Country Entity

• Id - Internal identifier

• Code - ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code

• Name - Country name

• CountryDialCode - Country dial code
  
  

CountryState Entity

• Id - Internal identifier

• CountryCode - ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code

• Code - FIPS 10-4 region code

• Name - State Name

• Abbreviation - State Name Abbreviation

You should have in mind that the country code is what makes the relations between the two entities (all the CountryStates of a certain Country will have his CountryCode).

In your application, you can either use directly these entities or use the actions that the component provides, so let's take a look at them.

Coutry_GetByCode

It receives the country code as input and returns you a record of the entity Country.

Country_GetById

Receives the country identifier as input and returns you a record of the entity Country.

Country_GetList

This one doesn’t have any inputs and returns you a list of all Country records and the total number of records returned.

Country_HasStates

So instead of rushing to get the country states, you can also see if the country has any states. This action receives the country identifier and returns you true or false if the current country has country states or not.

Country_GetStates

Now assuming that the country has states you can always use this action sending the country id to get the list of CountryState records.

CountryState_GetCountryStateListByCountryCode

This action also returns you the list of CountryState records but also returns the number of records and the previous one doesn’t, and instead of receiving the country id it receives the country code.