On 12/04/2017 15:55, Ken Dibble wrote:

> <snip>

> I'm looking for suggestions on how to produce results that include

> close matches on last names that doesn't require pre-processing.

>

About 20 years ago I did some work on marketing databases and one of the

big tasks is de-duping data. We did things like substituting vowels

with a * in the search value, then you get a more general match that

avoids some spelling mistakes. Unfortunately approaches like this would

require you to store the processed data.

Do you have the surname is a separate field with an index? If so you

could show the results of matches in a box below the search which

changes as they type each letter. The user can then see the list going

smaller as they type and will hopefully see what they are looking for.

If they have typed the whole name in and can't see the match they can

remove letters to look for a partial match. I would only match from say

the 3rd character or more as it may be too slow to display all the matches.

Peter

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