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What are codelists?

Categorical fields like legal form, legal status, and municipality return a coded value rather than a plain string. Each coded value has the same shape:
  • value — human-readable label in Slovak. Use for display.
  • code — stable entry key. Use for storing, filtering, and comparing.
  • codelistCode — identifies which codelist this value belongs to.
Most codelists are published by the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic (ŠÚR). UCE and STA are maintained by the Ministry of Interior and are not publicly available in the same way.

Why codes matter

Codes are stable keys that never change — the human-readable label can. A field value might get a wording update, a typo fix, or a punctuation change in the source data. The code behind it won’t. Two situations where this matters:
  • Storing or comparing data. Always store the code, not the label. Matching on a label that could silently change will eventually break.
  • Building in another language. Use the code as a key into your own translation table instead of parsing Slovak strings.
code can be an empty string when no matching codelist entry exists. Always guard against "" before using it as a lookup key.

Codelist reference


Resolving a code

Match on both code and codelistCode to avoid false positives — the same code string can appear in different codelists with different meanings.

Dual codelists on address fields

municipality, district, and country can reference entries from either a Statistical Office or a Ministry of Interior codelist, depending on which source register the entity comes from. Always check codelistCode before doing a lookup.