Below is a recipe for filling in missing postcodes - useful for sites who have started inputting postcodes themselves and now have access to a postcode xml file that can be loaded by the dataload utility. [Note that I have a Pentaho Kettle transform that will take a data from a csv file and generate the xml file and have use this to generate xml files for South Africa and Hong Kong.] The recipe is as follows: (this uses the Australian postcode file in the release package but will work with any xml file for another country)

First edit postcodesAU.xml and save it as say postcodesX.xml – for the lines

Add ‘X’ (must be uppercase because the codes have to be uppercase) prior to each of the codes (NOT the ids) and names - so you will end up creating a new country  Xaustralia with states Xvictoria, Xnew South Wales, etc

Now run dataload to load postcodesX.xml – it will pour out errors – one for every existing postcode (with lots of lines for each error). However, it will generate the missing ones – albeit for the X states.

You should be able to use  Administration|Lookups|State to examine the X states and see that they just have the missing postcodes

We now need to use the lookup replace facility. First replace Xaustralia by Australia using Administrator|Lookups|Country (and tick the box to delete Xaustralia at the same time)

Now use Administration|Lookups|State to replace Xnew South Wales by New South Wales (and tick the box to delete Xnew South Wales at the same time). Repeat for the other X states.

Regards, Tim G