org.wikimedia.thethe

This extension alters the sort name saved for organisations. It allows you to remove the 'The' from the beginning. The sort name is used from quicksearch so removing optional strings makes it easier for users to search and to realise the contact already exists with or without the 'the'.

Having standardised sort names is also useful for doing deduping - sort_name can be used as a field in a rule and The Justice League can then be deduped with Justice League.

The extension also permits suffixes to be removed or strings to be removed from anywhere in the sort name. The prefixes and suffixes to be replaced can be configured under Administer->Customize Data and Screens->Organization Sort Name Settings (per the screenshot above).

Notes:

• The patterns are applied in order. So prefixes of 'the ', 'the university of 'will not fix The University of Life, because once the 'the' is removed, the second pattern no longer matches. So you would need to swap the order (or use just 'university of ' instead which would apply).

• If you want to replace single quotes you have to 'escape' them with a backslash. For example, you could enter "'\'s'" as an anywhere pattern to change "Mary's" to "Mary". If doing this also watchout that Mary’s is not the same as Mary's and would need another pattern for the ’ character!

The extension is licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Requirements

• PHP v7.1+
• CiviCRM 5.13+

Installation (Web UI)

This extension has not yet been published for installation via the web UI.

Installation (CLI, Zip)

Sysadmins and developers may download the .zip file for this extension and install it with the command-line tool cv.

cd <extension-dir>
cv dl org.wikimedia.thethe@https://github.com/FIXME/org.wikimedia.thethe/archive/master.zip

Installation (CLI, Git)

Sysadmins and developers may clone the Git repo for this extension and install it with the command-line tool cv.

git clone https://github.com/FIXME/org.wikimedia.thethe.git
cv en thethe

Usage

If you install this it will start removing the The from the start of the sort name of any organization that is created or edited. This difference will be most noticeable from quicksearch - especially in organizations that have turned off the Automatic Wildcard search setting (turning this off gives a substantial performance improvement on larger sites)

Preview effects of settings

If you have access to the API4 explorer, you can call Contact.previewThethe. This will look up one matching organization name for each of the strings you have set and return an array with the (unchanged) organization_name and the new sort_name (and the contact ID).

This can be useful to figure out if you put the spaces in the right places etc.

Known Issues

• This only addresses Organizations. It could easily be extended to Households but more core changes would be needed for any changes to Individuals.

• The prefix and suffix patterns you choose are not case-sensitive; entering 'The ' as a pattern is the same as entering 'the '.

• The anywhere patterns will only be removed if the organization_name contains the lowercase version of the pattern. So an anywhere pattern of 'and ' will not remove and from an organisation called 'This And That'.

Changes

Up to v 1.2, only ASCII characters were considered in a case-insensitive way; the pattern université would not match UNIVERSITÉ. As long as your PHP has the mbstring extension installed, this is fixed in later versions.