Ways to get the List of Countries and Cities

[David Freeman]

Hi There!

I'm trying to create a User Registration page in ASP.NET and wondering what
is the best way to get the list of up-to-date Countries and Cities? Are
there any Web Services on the web that I can use to retrieve such
information? If not, what are the options?

Please, any suggestions and pointers will be very much appreciated!

Dave

 

[Peter Morris [Droopy eyes software]]

Yahoo.com has a geography directory. I once took all of the
countries/cities from there, but my list will be out of date by now.

--
Pete
====
ECO Modeler, Audio compression components, DIB graphics controls,
FastStrings
http://www.droopyeyes.com

Read or write articles on just about anything
http://www.HowToDoThings.com

My blog
http://blogs.slcdug.org/petermorris/

 

[Manohar Kamath]

Since this list does not get deprecated that soon, why not create your own
web service/component? You can find a list at:

http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-capitals-and-larger-cities-by-country

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

Why reinvent the wheel ?

Use this free component :

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/CountryCombo.asp

This one only has countries, but you can easily add cities.

You'll need to register with the Code Project
in order to download the source code, but it's free.

 

[Manohar Kamath]

Just looking at the article "Our control will populate the country names at
design time" -- not sure if I would use such an app which is a maintenance
nightmare. From the article I suggsted, once could just scrape the countries
and cities, and create some data source.

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

heh, heh...

Hi, Manohar.

re:

not sure if I would use such an app
which is a maintenance nightmare.

Why would you think it's "a maintenace nightmare" ?
How many countries are created every year ?

re:

Our control will populate the country names at design time

Yup, and then it runs as a compiled assembly, in memory.

You need to change something ? Add a country/city ?
Change the source, recomplie, and you're good to go.

No big deal.

re:

once could just scrape the countries
and cities, and create some data source.

Easier said than done, and you're still relying on changes
which happen at some site whose html format might change,
requiring a re-coding of the scrape.

I think I'd rather modify the source for the control
I suggested ( complete source is included ) to add
the capital cities, and then use *that*.

Updates could, still, be made by checking that list
you suggest, but relying on a control made by yourself
is bound to provide better results than relying on a page
scrape which might change at an inconvenient time,
or which might be unavailable for whatever reason.

 

[Manohar Kamath]

Why would you think it's "a maintenace nightmare" ?

Nothing against the code, but anything that is hard-coded is maintenance
risk -- if not in the immediate future, but soon thereafter. Plus, it is
adds to the inflexibility. Consider that you want to share the data with
another app, but you want to add new attributes like population, area, etc.
Doing so would require not only changing the data, but also changing the
app, with recompile. That would also mean the clients of the app need to
change, or you have to create a new version to cater to the new requirement.

Easier said than done, and you're still relying on changes
which happen at some site whose html format might change,
requiring a re-coding of the scrape.

I didn't mean to use the site itself a data source, just that there was a
list of countries and cities, and the person could scrape that list to
create a data souce -- XML file, database, etc.

 

[Juan T. Llibre]

re:

anything that is hard-coded is maintenance risk

And, presumably, something which isn't hard-coded,
but -instead- relies on some other method isn't ?

re:

you want to add new attributes like population, area

That wan't the problem posed, though.

This is a simple country/city dropdown list,
which you can reuse in a number of apps, Manohar.

Tell me something, regarding :

I didn't mean to use the site itself a data source,
just that there was a list of countries and cities,
and the person could scrape that list to create a
data source -- XML file, database, etc.

Wouldn't maintaining *that* data source
become a "maintenance nightmare", too ?

A list is a list is a list.

A simple country/city list will need updating at some point,
whenever a new country or a new city is added, and using
an XML file or a table in a database as a data source only
adds an unnecesary level of complexity to a simple dropdown,
wouldn't you say ?

If every time you need to populate a simple dropdown,
you need to hit a database or an XML file, that's
bound to perform slower than hitting an assembly which
will be initialized the first time, but will run from memory
from that point on.

It's no big thing, but I like the idea of
a dropdown initialized from an assembly.

 

[himasasi]

Hi There!

I'm trying to create a User Registration page in FLEX and JSP and wondering what
is the best way to get the list of up-to-date Countries and Cities? Are
there any Web Services on the web that I can use to retrieve such
information? If not, what are the options?

Please, any suggestions and pointers will be very much appreciated!

Hima

 

[paul_cool_fl]

I suggest you purchase a cities database from maxmind.com or salpure.com and use ASP.Net AJAX to your work done.

 

[siamsites]

maxmind.com has released a complete database of world cities with world countries reference (2 letter country codes) from 2006 and 2007 for free under the GPL license, there are over 3,047,000 records in the database.

You can download it for free at:

www[dot]maxmind[dot]com/download/worldcities/ :beer:

p.s. me hates the 50 post minimum to post links :damnmate:

 

[hk123]

I suggest you purchase a cities database from maxmind.com or salpure.com and use ASP.Net AJAX to your work done.

Another viable paid option is GeoDataSource.com and it comes with sample codes for ASP, .NET and PHP.

 

[cbielich]

I use countrycitystatelist.com, and its free and updated all the time