Limitation in duplicate detection not mentioned in User Guide

[nus-pe-bot]

There is a chance that there are multiple people named John Doe. And it is guaranteed that they have different phone number and email. As shown in the picture above, although it is the same name, the email and phone number is different from the current John Doe that is already in the customer list. The app should allow for these kind of entry or at least give a warning but not block it out completely. This limitation of duplicate detection is not mentioned in the User Guide. This is just a minor flaw in the feature implementation that can be quickly fixed.

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2223S1/pe-interim#5659] [original labels: type.FeatureFlaw severity.Low]}

[chloeelim]

Team's Response

Hi,

Duplicate detection limitations are explained in the FAQ section of the UG. We've stated that ArtBuddy can only detect duplicates in Customers by checking their names (and that this check is case-sensitive).

While trying to detect duplicates by first, checking the customer name and then checking the email/ phone number might be the most ideal, this implementation would require a pretty significant amount of effort. This is because on top of enforcing non-duplicate customers, we also enforce non-duplicate commissions between customers, while allowing duplicate commissions across customers.

Without boring you with details of our implementation, these checks can get rather complicated as the association between customer and commission is bi-directional- so we did not want to rush into adding support for more advanced duplicate detection and risk introducing more bugs into the system. (We tried and ran into a multitude of bugs due to this bi-directional association and bi-directional checks)

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Hence, we believe that this bug report qualifies for response.NotInScope because:

1. This limitation has already been stated in our UG.

2. ArtBuddy does not support advanced duplicate detection in the current version as this issue as been de-prioritized as our team had to focus on more important features and bugs which we felt would add more value to the user than this feature. (And de-prioritizing less important features is allowed)

3. Also, even without more advanced duplicate detection, ArtBuddy is still reasonably usable.

4. Handling this more advance duplicate detection would take a rather significant amount of effort (as explained, due to the bi-directional associativity between the Customer and Commission classes)

Hope this clarifies your queries. Thank you!

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Duplicate status (if any):

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