No answers, but...

Post #419,007 by a6l6e6x 7/19/17 3:34:26 PM 7/19/17 3:34:26 PM Reply	No answers, but... Remember that some names are so common that duplicates or more are possible. So "last, first" won't cut it. This is back a while, but I had a friend named Paul Smith who was visiting the White House on a special tour. It took him over an hour to get through the clearance process because as you might expect that even with middle initial or even middle name there were many "hits". Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #419,014 by scoenye 7/19/17 9:05:41 PM 7/19/17 9:05:41 PM Reply	This, plus... Caveat: I haven't used Base to do anything serious with. I think the normal behavior for a data drop down is to load all values that meet the specs (table, query, raw SQL) and typing then advances the cursor to the next matching value. You may be able to come up with a type ahead lookup by setting up a keyboard event handler attached to a drop down which uses a query to populate itself. (i.e. modify the "where" clause as the user types the name.) Either way, scalability is limited. The need for a junction table depends entirely on the overall data model. If there is no many-to-many relationship between two models, then a junction table would allow one to construct things that should not be possible. Base does not allow nullable fields as part of the primary key, but an additional unique constraint can contain nullable fields.
Post #419,017 by drook 7/20/17 12:59:43 AM 7/20/17 12:59:43 AM Reply	Ah, I tried it as the primary. I didn't think to do it again as an additional constraint. Thanks for the feedback on duplicate names. Yeah, I don't think I can solve that. The addresses I should be able to do. There's no way around one person entering "Fifth Street" and another entering "5th St." But that's why I'm trying to do some auto-complete magic. Make it easier to do things right, and they're more likely to do it. -- Drew
Post #419,018 by Another Scott 7/20/17 1:09:20 AM 7/20/17 1:09:20 AM Reply	Fifth/5th... In DC there are a bunch of lettered streets. I and J and U caused problems... Is this a national database, or it it restricted to local roads? If it's national / regional, you might want to look at how the USPS standardizes addresses. This must be a solved problem, and you might save yourself some work in seeing how they do it - I think they even have an API that other sites can use. Or maybe not - I'm no expert. But it's an interesting problem! Good luck. Cheers, Scott.
Post #419,019 by crazy 7/20/17 3:12:33 AM 7/20/17 3:12:33 AM Reply	Dont forget jr, sr, III, etc living at same home Major issue in my junk mail career was unique id of people.
Post #419,021 by drook 7/20/17 8:28:38 AM 7/20/17 8:28:38 AM Reply	I need to be less ambitious I've done name and address standardization and matching before. I know how hard it is to do well, but for some reason was forgetting all that and jumping straight to UI work. Idjit. We've only got two days to do this. What we need is a good data model and user-friendly data entry. Once they've got data, they can clean it up via USPS API in the future. -- Drew

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