There are certain names that do not contain just alphanumerics.

[nus-pe-bot]

As shown in the picture above, trying to add a customer with s/o in their name will lead to invalid command. However in real life, there are people with characters that are not just alphanumerics in their name.

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2223S1/pe-interim#5759] [original labels: type.FeatureFlaw severity.Low]}

[chloeelim]

Team's Response

Hi,

This is an limitation of ArtBuddy that our team is already privy to. While we do agree that names do not just contain alphanumeric characters, we did not have the bandwidth to add support for non-alphanumeric characters in customer names in v1.4. As such, support for non-alphanumeric names have been decidedly delayed to future versions of ArtBuddy, as stated in the FAQ section (screenshot is attached below).

We think that delaying support for non-alphanumeric characters in names is valid for the following reasons:

1. [Regarding international characters]: Most languages have romanisation (converting foreign characters to Latin alphabets), meaning that even though a customer has a foreign name, it likely can be converted to a spelling using latin characters, which is supported in ArtBuddy.
2. [Special characters in names]: While some names do contain special characters, we think that in most cases they can be omitted or modified and still retain their 'recognisability'/ 'understandability'. In the provided example of Indian names (in which slashes are common- especially in Singapore), users can choose to use the non-abbreviated versions of 's/o' or 'd/o' (son of/ daughter of), or choose to omit them. (source: https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/singaporean-culture/singaporean-culture-naming#indian-naming-conventions).

In light of issues we foresee with adding support for non-alphanumeric names (eg: parsing names with slashes can be an issue if they clash with our prefixes, there is no easy way to fix this yet), as well as the less-consequential ramifications of not allowing non-alphanumeric characters (as the app still can be used by the users to fulfill their needs), we decided to deprioritise this feature to a later version. We had more features and issues to look into, which we felt were of higher priorities (eg: adding statistics, adding support for images, and fixing major bugs) that we had to deal with, and unfortunately, support for non-alphabetical names just could not be done by v1.4 release.

So, because rectifying [this feature flaw] is less important and we have already stated this as not supported and coming in later versions of ArtBuddy, this bug report qualifies for response.NotInScope. (Also since, fixing the feature flaw is NOT essential for the app to be reasonably useful and would require some significant additional effort to fully support without bugs).

Thanks!

Duplicate status (if any):

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