Good practice: Reading a systems country (location)

🛠️ Good Practices
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Quick tip: Use the standardized country codes

If you are interested in which country a system is located the best practice is to use the GET /systems (https://developer.gridx.ai/reference/get_systems) endpoint. In the response you can find the “countryCode” which is filled by an abbreviation of a country according to ISO 3166

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To add a small example: The following script pulls 500 systems from the current account and counts how many there are per country.

It …

  • loads 500 systems,
  • selects the country code, ignoring systems w/o location ('.[].location.countryCode | select( . != null )'), and
  • counts the number of occurrences of each country.

It’s a contrived example, but it shows where the country code is in the system response payload and that they are standardized.

curl --request GET \
     --url 'https://api.gridx.de/systems?page=1&per_page=500' \
     --header 'accept: application/vnd.gridx.v2+json' \
     --header "authorization: Bearer $GRIDX_TOKEN" \
| jq -r '.[].location.countryCode | select( . != null )' \
| sort \
| uniq -c

#... curl stderr ...

   2 AT
 424 DE
   1 FR
   1 IT
  10 LU

(yeah, probably that would have worked with plain jq, but I found it easier that way :wink: )

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Hello,
I’ve noticed that changing the system location country from gridx/system page would change the location.country field with the countryCode value, and let the location.countryCode with the value it had before.
Is it the normal behaviour?
Because of that, we have a mix of country names and country codes, depending on wether they got updated though the API or in xenon.
Thank you!

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Hello @maya,
Thank you for bringing this up! :slight_smile:

Just to confirm my understanding, you’re noticing that when editing the country field, the full country names are displayed in the dropdown, and after saving, the country code is being displayed instead of the country name, correct?

Please let me know if my understanding is correct, and if there’s anything else you’d like me to clarify.

Thanks,
VS

5

Hello @Vidyasagar
Not exactly. Let me give you an example.
Let’s take a system that is in Germany, the location contains
{ country: “Germany”, countryCode: “DE” }
Editing the country to Switzerland in Xenon would transform the location to
{ country: “CH”, countryCode: “DE” }

Because of that, we have many weird cases in our systems, where the countryCode is outdated, and the country is a countryCode.

Thanks!

6

Alright - thank you for bringing this up, @maya
We will look into whether and how we can improve

  1. the behavior of our UI
  2. the clarity of how location works in the endpoint
  3. the now misalignment of your existing systems with non-matching locations

Will come back to you once we have news!

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I moved the discussion to a new topic to make it more easily discoverable.

https://community.developer.gridx.de/t/system-country-and-countrycode-inconsistent/498