Able to violate unique naming constraint in the application

[nus-se-script]

The application does not trim whitespace when importing the json data file. This means the user is able to effectively get multiple users with the same name in the application, which violates the constraint that duplicate names are not provided.

An example json file is provided below:

{
  "persons" : [ {
    "name" : "Alex",
    "phone" : "87438807",
    "email" : "alexyeoh@example.com",
    "address" : "Blk 30 Geylang Street 29, #06-40",
    "age" : "23",
    "sex" : "Male",
    "appointments" : [ "11/11/2025 1100" ],
    "tags" : [ "friends" ],
    "note" : {
      "appointments" : [ "12/12/2023 1111", "11/12/2022 1100" ],
      "remark" : [ ],
      "medication" : [ ]
    },
    "starredStatus" : "false"
  }, {
    "name" : "Alex ",
    "phone" : "87438807",
    "email" : "alexyeoh@example.com",
    "address" : "Blk 30 Geylang Street 29, #06-40",
    "age" : "23",
    "sex" : "Male",
    "appointments" : [ "11/11/2025 1100" ],
    "tags" : [ "friends" ],
    "note" : {
      "appointments" : [ "12/12/2023 1111", "11/12/2022 1100" ],
      "remark" : [ ],
      "medication" : [ ]
    },
    "starredStatus" : "false"
  } ]
}

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2425S1/pe-interim#38] [original labels: severity.Medium type.FunctionalityBug]}

[myrilla12]

Team's Response

Thank you for raising this. However, users aren't actually able to add duplicate names using the add command regardless of whitespaces:

I believe what you're referring to is if users were to manually modify data/addressbook.json. However, we did state in the user guide that certain edits may cause unexpected behaviour and thus users should only edit it if they are confident in doing so:

For now, this is not a priority as we don't encourage users to modify the data directly and users won't be inconvenienced by this in that case. However, we will consider improving this in future iterations.

Duplicate status (if any):

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