Thanks all. The present system uses Lotus Notes and scripts, has a two minute response time, and has to be an exact match. I.e., I think whatever I do "using the power of Rbase", will be an improvement. I suspect I'll have them fill up a form with what they know for sure and handle it with Chooses from there. I.e., a gray sedan with a PA license and the first three letters of the plate are "ABC". Depending on hits, you can combine "gray", "sedan", "ABC", with AND's or OR's.
Dennis **** At 03:36 PM 7/8/2003 -0500, you wrote: >I don't know about matching gray with silver, or even 5's and s's, but one >little-used feature of R:Base is its implementation of the SOUNDEX >"sounds like" algorithm in WHERE conditions. > >in the concomp database, try > >SEL * FROM contacts WHERE contlname SOUNDS 'petersen' >SEL * FROM contacts WHERE contlname SOUNDS 'balee' > >The algorith forces you to get the first consonant right, I think, but then >substitutes just about any vowel for vowel, and knows about lots of >homophonic combinations, like K and C, or PH and F, and guesses on >that basis. > >For the 5's and S's, you could conceivably fiddle with the colating tables >(that affect sort order) in your cfg file. That could make ones sort like ells, >and zeros sort like ohs, and fives sort like esses. > >Bill > > >On Tue, 08 Jul 2003 16:25:26 -0400, Dennis Fleming wrote: > >>I think this is a Father of RBase question, but I'm not sure. I recall that >>Wayne built some s/w for the police but I don't remember what it did. In >>our community here I offered (pro bono) to set up a vehicle ID system so >>when folks misbehave and public safety gets a call with a partial vehicle >>description, they can quickly match it up. The standard search is easy. >>What I was wondering is if anyone knows of a similar color, number, letter >>search. Silver would also look for gray, 5's & S's, Ohs and zeros, etc. >>I suspect there is even a similar make/model table out there somewhere. > > > Dennis Fleming IISCO http://www.TheBestCMMS.com Phone: 570 775-7593 Fax: 570 775-9797
