First name, middle name, last name. Why not Full Name?
I am trying to find a better approach for storing people's name in the table. What is the benefits of 3 field over 1 field for storing persons name?
UPDATE
Here is an interesting discussion and resources about storing names and user experience
Merging firstname/last name into one field
You can always construct a full name from its components, but you can't always deconstruct a full name into its components.
Say you want to write an email starting with "Dear Richie" - you can do that trivially if you have a given_name field, but figuring out what someone's given name is from their full name isn't trivial.
You can also trivially search or sort by given_name, or family_name, or whatever.
(Note I'm using given_name, family_name, etc. rather than first_name, last_name, because different cultures put their names in different orders.)
Solving this problem in the general case is hard - here's an article that gives a flavour of how hard it is: Representing People's Names in Dublin Core.
Keep your data as clean as you can!
How?
Ask your user only as few things as you absolutely need at the time you ask.
How you store the name does not matter. What does matter is that
- the user experience is as good as can be
- you don't have false data in your system
If you annoy the users with mandatory fields to fill in and re-question them several times, they can get upset and not buy into your application right there and then. You want to avoid bad user experiences at all times.
No user cares how easy it is for you to search your database for his middle name. He wants to have a easy, feel good experience, that's it.
What do users do if they are forced to input data like their postal address, or even email address when they only want a "read-only" account with no notifications needed? They put garbage data into your system. This will render your super search and sort algorithms useless anyway.
Thus, my advice would be in any app to gather just as little information from your user as you really need in order to serve them, no more.
If for example you run a online shop for pet food, don't ask your users at sign-up what kind of pets they own. Make it an option for them to fill in once they are logged in and all happy (new customers). Don't ask them their postal address until they order stuff that is actually carried to their house, stuff they pay for and thus care that YOU have their exact coordinates.
This will lead to a lot better data quality and this is what you should care about, not technical details the user has no benefit from....
In your example I would just ask for the full name (not sure though) and once the user willingly subscribes to your newsletter, let the user decide how he/she wants to be addressed...
As others have said, how do you decompose a full name in to its component parts.
- Colin Angus Mackay
- Jean Michel Jarre
- Vincent van Gogh
- Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
How do you reliably decompose that lot?
To learn more, see falsehoods programmers believe about names.
I was looking up the Spanish Civil War the other day, and found this exception to most rules:
- Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde, Salgado y Pardo de Andrade
- Father: Nicolás Franco y Salgado-Araújo
- Mother: María del Pilar Bahamonde y Pardo de Andrade
Next time I'm working on a system that has to store names, I'm going to try something radical: designing from the requirements.
What are we going to use the names for?
- Name on an address label for the postal service
- Greeting on the website
- Informal name
Based on what the names will be used for, we'd determine how much information to store. Maybe we allow the user to enter all three of those, including line breaks in the first case (Generalissimo Franco might want his full titles and appointments listed, if he weren't still dead). Maybe we provide First, Middle, Last, Generation as an option, and fill in the rest as defaults. Maybe we offer other common options like Surname, Given Name.
This is in contrast to the old-style First, Middle, Last we've used since before I started programming in COBOL back in 1975, and have "made fit" ever since.