On 19 Sep 2014, at 3:58pm, James K. Lowden <jklow...@schemamania.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 02:02:30 +0100 > Simon Slavin <slav...@bigfraud.org> wrote: > >> By the way I wanted to warn you about starting any project with first >> name, middle name and last name fields. This leads to problems, and >> I would go to some lengths to avoid it if possible. It would be >> better to provide two columns: >> >> name (their name, however they want it to be shown) >> nameInSortOrder (their name, in whatever order you feel it should be >> sorted) > > I wonder what "problems" you're talking about. First, if you automatically generate letters, a letter to "Patrick Nielsen Hayden" is going to start "Dear Mr/Mrs Hayden". That's incorrect. His surname is "Nielsen Hayden". Similarly a letter to "Edward Fitz William" should be addressed "Dear Mr Fitz William". Then, if you sort the names into order, you're going to find "Patrick Nielsen Hayden" under H, whereas you should find him under N. > Problems arising from the schema you suggest: > > 1. select by last name > 2. select by first name > 3. duplicate detection[1] > 4. "however they want" is unknown and idiosyncratic > 5. "whatever order" may be more than one For 1, why are you selecting by last name ? The person I named above has the surname "Nielsen Hayden". Which would you be selecting and why ? For 2, match the string entered with the beginning of the 'name' field, probably using LIKE and a percent character. For 3, check to see if either field is a duplicate. For 4, type in their name however they wrote it on the form you're copying. For 5, are you telling me you don't know how you want the name sorted ? In that case, perhaps there's no need to retain a sorting field at all. Simon. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
