Sorting compound names

[Robert Brenstein]

>
>The method route won't work, because the Valentina functions aren't 
>robust enough to handle what needs to be done (e.g. multiple words 
>to ignore, multiple names in a field, etc.). The tmp table method I 
>outlined before will work though, I think.
>
>I agree with your point about inconsistencies between languages, 
>regions, etc. My application is international, and is used by folks 
>from the US to Europe to Asia.
>
>I would offer "German/Dutch/whatever" sorting as an option the user 
>can set a runtime. It will basically ask what words are to be 
>ignored when sorting records by name, so it's generic. I imagine 
>most users will not want it. But for those who do (i.e. the 
>non-anglophilic person you quoted above) it should suffice.
>
>Thanks again,
>
>Jon

I had to face the same issue when producing a scientific conference 
registration and abstract submission database last year. The number 
of authors varied and many submissions had authors from different 
countries. I found that on top of language/country preferences, some 
people had their own preferences overwriting the former.

I opted to require entering first and last name in separate fields, 
thus shifting the burden onto submitters: if 'von' (for example) was 
entered with the last name, the name got sorted with v's. But you may 
not have such a luxury if dealing with pre-existing data.

Proper sorting in such an application is practically impossible since 
rules for sorting special characters vary from language to language, 
and database accepts only a single language specification for a 
field. So I resigned to the default international sorting of my 
programming environment using ascii for language in Valentina. This 
worked fine.

My bigger problem turned out cleaning up user entries -- some people 
entered names all upper case, some all lower case, some mixed them 
incorrectly (typos like RObert). Some entered middle name or initial 
with last name (but some last names had 2-3 words -- without 
hyphenation -- to make things more complicated). It is amazing how 
complicated the name business is and how inconsistent users can be 
when entering data.

Good luck.

Robert

Robert