when I have situations like this and there seems no other way around the
problem...... what I do is put 2 fields on the record
the first one to hold the company name the way it was entered and a second
one that is initialized to that user-entered data..... but the
administrator has a screen where they can cleanup/fix that second field to
get the values down to a standard way of typing/naming things
this way they can clean up the data as it comes in..... as slowly or as
quickly as they feel like it..... if it's a system where consistency is
seriously important, then I email them whenever a new record arrives so
they're notified to go and see if they want to fix the spelling/typing for
the newest record
and of course your admin dropdown form fields would now use this 2nd
'cleaned-up' field
hth,
Tobe Goldfinger
jdt technologies, ltd.
516-569-5606
At 12:06 PM 5/10/2001 , you wrote:
>Here's a question that's been bothersome for some time.
>
>We have an interface where participants register for meeting. There is a
>form they fill out with basic information, including the pharmaceutical
>company they are associated with.
>
>We use drop downs where we can to keep data as constant as possible, but we
>cannot use dropdowns for the company they are with as there are far too many
>to compile and list.
>
>And therein lies our problem. Users from one company can have a half dozen
>different ways to spell their company name.
>
>There is an admin search page where an administrator can search for
>registered users by several different criteria, one of which is the user's
>company name. I dynamically build a drop down for this field on the search
>page by pulling all distinct company names from the db. Of course, there are
>several different variations of the company name in the dropdown, which
>makes it very cumbersome.
>
>Has anyone had to deal with this? If so, how did you deal with it? And/or
>does someone have an idea on how to go about dealing with it?
>
>
>Erika
>(with a *K*)
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