.. index::
   single: Countries

Countries
=========

**Countries** are a part of the :doc:`Addressing </book/customers/addresses/addresses>` concept.
The **Country** entity represents a real country that your shop is willing to sell its goods in (for example the UK).
It has an ISO code to be identified easily (`ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 <https://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes>`_).

Countries might also have **Provinces**, which is in fact a general name for an administrative division, within a country.
Therefore we understand provinces as states of the USA, voivodeships of Poland or Bundesländer of Germany.

How to add a country?
---------------------

To give you a better insight into Countries, let's have a look on how to prepare and add a Country to the system programmatically.
We will do it with a province at once.

You will need factories for countries and provinces in order to create them:

.. code-block:: php

    /** @var CountryInterface $country */
    $country = $this->container->get('sylius.factory.country')->createNew();

    /** @var ProvinceInterface $province */
    $province = $this->container->get('sylius.factory.province')->createNew();

To the newly created objects assign codes.

.. code-block:: php

    // US - the United States of America
    $country->setCode('US');
    // US_CA - California
    $province->setCode('US_CA');

Provinces may be added to a country via a collection. Create one and add the province object to it
and using the prepared collection add the province to the Country.

.. code-block:: php

    $provinces = new ArrayCollection();
    $provinces->add($province);

    $country->setProvinces($provinces);

You can of course simply add single province:

.. code-block:: php

    $country->addProvince($province);

Finally you will need a repository for countries to add the country to your system.

.. code-block:: php

    /** @var RepositoryInterface $countryRepository */
    $countryRepository = $this->get('sylius.repository.country');

    $countryRepository->add($country);

From now on the country will be available to use in your system.

Learn more
----------

* :doc:`Addressing - Bundle Documentation </components_and_bundles/bundles/SyliusAddressingBundle/index>`
* :doc:`Addressing - Component Documentation </components_and_bundles/components/Addressing/index>`