sorting states in state/province dropdown

Question

Civi 5.11, WordPress 5.1.1

I work with an organization whose Contacts (of all types) are limited to 4 states in the US. (Available States/Provinces in the localization settings includes only the US.) In order to speed up data entry for my organization's users, I'd like those 4 states to appear at the top of the States dropdown when new Contacts are added. However I don't see this capability in the Option Groups settings, and I don't see an Order field in the civicrm_state_province table.

Are my only ways forward to create a custom State field, or develop a custom hook?

Answer 1

If you don't want to write a hook then one option is to just update the name in the database so that it sorts to the top, for example:

update civicrm_state_province set name='_Washington' where name='Washington';

Or equivalently update the states you don't use so they sort to the bottom, like prefix a 'Z_'.

This might get overwritten by an upgrade if there's a change like a state gets annexed by Canada or something ... you're probably safe.

It's also possible some extensions might not work with it, but it's stored as an id not a word and the id doesn't change.