×
The internal search function is temporarily non-functional. The current search engine is no longer viable and we are researching alternatives.
As a stop gap measure, we are using Google's custom search engine service.
If you know of an easy to use, open source, search engine ... please contact support@midrange.com.
Hi Alan,
Handling unicode is at once both easy and hard. To make your database
fields into unicode fields is easy. Just declare them as graphic and
give them a CCSID like 1200...
How to populate them is a different matter altogether. Especially if
you are using legacy user interfaces, like 5250.
Alan Shore wrote:
what would be considered a good "size" for fields like
first name
last name
Address lines
Yikes... that is an incredibly complicated question. When you are
talking about the USA, it's often reasonable to code a "first name",
"middle initial" and "last name" field. But even in the USA this is
often inadequate! Many folks have multiple first names, multiple middle
names or even multiple (often hyphenated) last names.
And that's just the USA! In many cultures, the "first" name (the name
printed first) is actually the family name, whereas the last name (the
name printed last) is the given name. Is it reasonable to refer to the
fields as first and last?
What of Arabic names that can have many parts? (I've seen some as long
as 10 words.)
Spanish/Hispanic names often have two surnames.
Googling finds the following discussion on Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/128099/what-is-the-longest-human-name-you-can-expect
(or,
http://tinyurl.com/6lpvfj )
The recommendation seems to be: don't separate the name into pieces
(first, last, etc). Instead, just have one field for a person's name,
and let it include their given name, their family name, etc, as they
prefer it to be. Then, make the field very long :)
Read the stack overflow thread... if nothing else, it's thought provoking.
midrange.com
