Using name to differentiate between two students might not be ideal

[nus-se-script]

Using solely Name parameter to differientiate between two students might not be ideal, especially in a tuition context where multiple students can have the same name, for example, if I have two students with the name Ryan, I would not be able to add both students into the system, even if they are two distinct students.

Maybe a better way is to check if the name AND phone number are the same, then you can considered it them as the same person. The implementation is also relatively simple, as you can just add a check at equals() method in your Peron class to differentiate them. Since this can most likely cause occasional incovenience to users, especially if they have the student with the same name, so i categorised it as Severity.Medium

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_{[original: nus-cs2103-AY2425S1/pe-interim#3852] [original labels: severity.Medium type.FeatureFlaw]}

[waihin26]

Team's Response

Thanks for the report. This has been a major point of contention for our team, and we decided to preserve AB3's duplicate handling by Name after much thought:

• We allow blank fields for all fields except Name. If we remove the condition for duplicate person being Name, then the following scenario can occur:

  1. Tutor adds two students with the same name Ryan Tan and all other fields blank
  2. One month, one of the Ryans does not pay, and the tutor accordingly marks a Ryan as having paid
  3. Tutor forgets which Ryan is the one who has paid and is inconvenienced by having to check with them separately, as there is nothing in the Name or other fields to differentiate the Ryans

• We can allow duplicate handling by checking against Name and another field e.g. Phone. However, as all fields except Name can be blank, this will make duplicate handling very difficult to implement if we were to preserve our current implementation of allowing blank fields.

• Getting around duplicates is very easily done, on top of Name allowing special characters such as ( and ). e.g. the tutor could create two Ryans with the name Ryan who wears glasses and the name Ryan who's always late to differentiate the two.

• There is no strict requirement for accurate legal names in EduTuTu as it is a app for private, personal use by private tutors.

Therefore, we believe the issue raised here is valid, but is more appropriate as a feature request for EduTuTu, and would require a lot of effort to get duplicity checking working with blank fields if we were to define duplicity by another field. Hence it is not in scope.

As duplicate persons by duplicate names is very easily circumvented, along with the lax input validation for Name which allows special characters, and the rarity of a private tutor teaching 2 students with the exact same name, we believe it is low severity.

^ from our UG

Duplicate status (if any):

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