Membership Records: MLS vs. LDS.ORG

An issue is arising with the use of the lds.org for membership records. It involves the standard for the US Postal Service designations for addresses. The web application, when edit a member profile is selected and then saved, changes the state designation from California to CA and looks up the 4 digit route for the designated address. That's OK, just that MLS does not use the CA state designator nor can it be changed to CA by the user. My question is - which is it, California or CA?

gwr119 wrote:An issue is arising with the use of the lds.org for membership records. It involves the standard for the US Postal Service designations for addresses. The web application, when edit a member profile is selected and then saved, changes the state designation from California to CA and looks up the 4 digit route for the designated address. That's OK, just that MLS does not use the CA state designator nor can it be changed to CA by the user. My question is - which is it, California or CA?

From your description, this seems like an obvious bug in the lds.org Clerk Resources tool. Odd that it has never been reported. The supposedly standardized addresses do not behave this way for my state; the online tool spells out "Texas." But there are other longstanding issues with the tool, which does not even follow postal standards correctly in other ways, mangling apartment addresses.

So my advice is to override the abbreviated CA address suggested by the buggy online tool and enter California, as you would in MLS.

I don't think it is a bug to use the USPS approved formats for addresses. I think that MLS has always been wrong. Our Stake wants us to spell out everything even though the USPS convention is abbreviations. Still didn't get an answer from Stake on that one.

The state in MLS is not actually "spelled out" -- it is displayed from a table of place names that is provided by CMIS. When you select the state from the list in MLS or Clerk Resources, the value actually being stored is the identifier from the place table.

I just checked MLS and Clerk Resources and both of them are displaying the full state name when displaying or editing an address, so maybe I'm misunderstanding where the problem lies.