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True enough but it is common. I was just looking at
a data specification that insists in Louisiana all
first, last, middle names plus suffix can be stuffed
into a 20 character wide field. It ain't practical
in a land where a lot of the names have French origins.
So the programmer has to call the State contact and
ask "Is this REALLY what you want" meaning, "Do you
understand that we will truncate and you have no way
of knowing how much of or which part of the concatenated
string is going away?".
And that is a simple one. (Of course, they shouldn't have
concatenated anyway but that is a different problem.)
Still, I am a believer in cheap validation if one can
get the rules to match the real world data. Admittedly
and by example, that can be tough to do in advance. A
goodly part of the cost of records management implementation
is finding all the bad rules over good data problems.
len
From: Mike Fitzgerald [mailto:mike@wyeast.net]
Michael Kay wrote:
> I've always been sceptical about validation. It encourages people to
> enter incorrect data in order to get it past incorrect rules. It's one
> of the things that gives computers a reputation for being inflexible.
Sounds to me like its more of a data model/web design problem than a
validation problem.
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