Name validation during registration

[shaun-technovation]

• Prevent someone from entering a period for their first or last name
• Require at least one alpha character

[dboyer]

Hey team! Please add your planning poker estimate with Zenhub @shaun-technovation @viviancan

[shaun-technovation]

This is on QA (just a simple validation that requires at least one alphabetical character be entered for first and last name)

[dboyer]

Tested on QA and confirmed:

• I had to enter an alphabetical character (no punctuation or numbers) when registering as a student
• When I edited my profile, it failed if I tried to include only a punctuation mark, number, or something else that was a non-alphabetic character

@shaun-technovation Two potential things:

• When I tried to register as both a student and mentor, I tested entering just A as my last name. I got a message I needed to add an alphabetical character. If I make the character into a lower case a, I no longer get that message.

• It looks like it's reading accented characters as non-alphabetical characters. Is it possible to change that?

Based on the accented character issue, I wonder if this name validation will also prevent people entering non-Roman characters. I know we have some Arabic and Cyrillic characters that people have added.

[shaun-technovation]

When I tried to register as both a student and mentor, I tested entering just A as my last name. I got a message I needed to add an alphabetical character. If I make the character into a lower case a, I no longer get that message.

Good catch! I have a fix for this and it will be on QA soon.

Based on the accented character issue, I wonder if this name validation will also prevent people entering non-Roman characters. I know we have some Arabic and Cyrillic characters that people have added.

Hmm, good call out, yeah, I'm pretty sure this would prevent only accented/special characters from being entered. :-/

[shaun-technovation]

Based on the accented character issue, I wonder if this name validation will also prevent people entering non-Roman characters. I know we have some Arabic and Cyrillic characters that people have added.

Hmm, good call out, yeah, I'm pretty sure this would prevent only accented/special characters from being entered. :-/

I'm wondering if we reverse the regex, instead of requiring an alphabetical character; don't allow only a period, or dash, etc. and allow anything else as valid. 🤔

[shaun-technovation]

When I tried to register as both a student and mentor, I tested entering just A as my last name. I got a message I needed to add an alphabetical character. If I make the character into a lower case a, I no longer get that message.

Good catch! I have a fix for this and it will be on QA soon.

This should be fixed on QA now.

[dboyer]

Confirmed on QA that I could register when I entered an upper case letter as the single character in the first or last name fields.

[dboyer]

Moving this back to in progress as we've determined that we do want to support non-Roman alphabetic characters in the name fields.

[shaun-technovation]

This is on QA. I updated the regex so that a name can't start w/ a period or a dash, but those characters can appear elsewhere in their name.

[dboyer]

Confirmed on QA that a single punctuation mark cannot be in the first or last name field.

@shaun-technovation It looks like accented characters can be a second character but not a single character. Is that accurate? Same for Cyrillic characters. If that's intentional for technical reasons, I think it's okay.

[shaun-technovation]

@shaun-technovation It looks like accented characters can be a second character but not a single character. Is that accurate? Same for Cyrillic characters. If that's intentional for technical reasons, I think it's okay.

Ah, sorry, I totally made a bonehead move, I merged my changes to QA, but forgot to push them, so the changes weren't on QA, doh! 🤦 Anywho, the new changes are now on QA.

[dboyer]

Tested on QA and I can now add a single character that is accented or in a non-Roman character set.

However, I was also able to add a single comma, plus sign, semicolon, question mark, etc in the field. The only punctuation marks that seemed to be restricted as a single character entered in the field were a period or a dash.

[shaun-technovation]

However, I was also able to add a single comma, plus sign, semicolon, question mark, etc in the field. The only punctuation marks that seemed to be restricted as a single character entered in the field were a period or a dash.

That is expected^, only a dash and period are covered for now. We can add those special characters (and any others) to the list of invalid characters.

[dboyer]

okay - I checked with Sasha and she has only seen dash and period as the single punctuation mark to avoid putting in a name. I'm good with deploying this as is and we update later as needed.

[dboyer]

Confirmed on production that I could not register with just a period or dash in the name fields. I could use a single accented character.