OpenVPMS was conceived in a country that uses large grained postcodes, ie multiple localities (suburbs in OpenVPMS speak) share the same postcode.

In countries such as the USA, Canada and the UK, fine grained post/zip codes are used and the one locality/suburb may include multiple zip/post codes.

I recently built the lookup.suburb data for Texas.  The approach taken was to adopt a scheme in which the zip code had its trailing characters set to * if the suburb/locality has multiple zip codes. Thus Abernathy, which has only one zip code has the zip 79311, but Abeline which includes 11 zip codes in the range 79607 through 79699 has the zip 796**.

Hence when entering a contact location, you select the suburb/locality, and if the post/zip code has trailing asterisks, you ask the customer what their actual zip code is and correct the setting (eg changing 796** to 79604).

To build the xml file for the dataload utility, I started with a csv file of US zip codes, and massaged this with Excel.

If anyone wants either the Texas data or the spreadsheets used, please yell.

Regards, Tim G