[turba] Further to; Firstname / LastName in addressbook - splitting them up

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Johny <horde at agotnes.com>:

> Add Contact -
>    You cannot edit the 'Name' field anymore, instead;
>    Add First Name / Last Name, it makes a composite Name out of these
> and submits to driver.

My worry here is people with a non-western style name.  Some people only
have one name...  Some others might have five or more names.  Anything we
do needs to be flexible enough to handle these cases.

>    In LDAP this sets cn to composite name, sn to last name and givenName
> to first name, basically from the sources.php mapping.

Just make sure it acts right if only one field is set, and that you can
somehow put in multiple names for those with lots of names and get a 
reasonable response out of it.

>    John Smith (FirstName LastName)
>    Smith, John (LastName, FirstName)
>    Smith John (would fail, however, cut&paste would allow for easy fix)

And how about others like:

Eric (just first name)
Rostetter (just last name)
Eric Jon Rostetter (three names)
Mr. Eric Jon Rostetter (how to we parse out titles et al?)
The Honorable Eric Jon Rostetter (just another example).

> Question is, is this of interest to others? 

Yes, very much so.  I'd love to see this done.  But I think we need to
be very careful to handle as many cases as possible.

At The University of Toledo (my previous job, before The University of
Texas) we had a lame admissions program (turn-key commercial thingy) that
insisted on western style names (first+last).  But we would get one or two
students a year who had only one name.  The software wouldn't allow this.
So eventually we ended up using their name as the last name, and putting
"Ms." or "Mr." in the first name field, just so it would accept the name,
and still print out fairly reasonable on the reports et al.

The point is, different cultures do different things, and we need to
make sure we can accomodate them if at all possible.

> Do any of the Horde blokes
> see it as useful enough to warrant inclusion in the standard distro? 

I would think so.  But I still have the above mentioned concerns.

> If
> so I can re-jig my changes to work with the HEAD and submit proper patches.

That is critical to getting changes into CVS in a timely manor.

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Why get even? Get odd!