Rails best practices - How do you handle unique users that may have identical records?

Question

How do you handle real name conflicts? Is there an established best practice or UI design pattern for disambiguating records like this? If authors can have many articles but more than one author can possibly have the same name how would you enable users to select the author they actually want when creating articles?

I can't dictate the author names be unique. The authors may have some other information that could individuate them (their articles or other optional fields).

To make this clearer - users are not authors. Users are people entering information about authors and articles. The only guaranteed information present for an author is the author's name. Other details are optional.

So if a user is creating a new record for an article they will have to either select or create an author for the many-to-many relationship between authors & articles.

With unambiguous rails examples such as the blog post category dropdown, like ryan bates uses in his railscasts, it is easy to create or update. If it exists link the blog post to it, if it doesn't then create and link the blog post to it.

My case is much messier. If it exists isn't that meaningful but I don't want to create a separate author entry for every article the author does.

Answer 1

Presumably you have a key that means you know which user authored which records, so it comes down to how you can best disambiguate them for your users.

Perhaps you need to ask your authors for a brief summary of themselves in their profile that you can use to disambiguate them on their terms. Alternatively depending on the type of article you might choose to describe them in terms of geography ("John Biggs, Florida", "John Biggs, California" ) or perhaps by the subject areas they choose to write about: "John Biggs, Java Expert", "John Biggs, Indonesia Specialist" and so on.

You could even just have "John Biggs (1)", "John Biggs (2)" and so on. I seem to recall this works alright for IMDB, who are a good example of a site that has had to sort this problem.

The important thing in usability where these types of thing are concerned is consistency- you need to always identify your authors in the same way so you don't have "John Biggs, Florida" and "John Biggs (2)" and you need to make sure that the identity you give to an author doesn't change once it is set up, so "John Biggs (2)" never becomes "John Biggs (5)" and your users can identify them whenever they see the disambiguated name as the same person who had that name previously.

Answer 2

You don't! Names are a bad method of identification as you're finding out. You have a number of methods around this:

Add some form of unique identifier with normal users this would be a username to check for uniqueness. In your case, the method described above name(1) might have to do, if you really have no other information other than the name.

An alternative would be to use multiple attributes to make a composite key (e.g. name + dob)

Answer 3

One thing that worked for me on a past project is to have a text box in which users can type in the author's name. As they type, I update a div with possible matches - similar to Stack Overflow when you type a tag in the ignored or interesting box.

Users can click on a name in the div which opens the record in a new window - new window has a button, "select this author," which takes you back to the original page with that author in the textfield as Author Name (id).

If they submit the form with an ambiguous name, we have an extra step where we display matches, and they choose which one they mean.

I imagine you'd want something a little more streamlined if this is a data-entry type application, but on that project adding an author was an infrequent operation.

Answer 4

Several things to think about: Can you filter by subject matter first? For instance if John Jones (1) writes articles about genetics and John Jones (2) writes articles about computer networking, bu having the user select the general subejct matter first, you may be able to filter out many of the less applicable possible duplicate names. (I would however have a button to see the unfiltered list becasue sometimes people write arrticles in a new subject matter). If you don't want to limit the choices perhaps a sort by subject matter or location could make it easier to find the right one.

When you show the list of possible duplicate names, show general information about the author including address and university affiliation and possibly the name of one article. Have a button to click on to show existing articles for any one of them. That way if you know the John Jones you want is located in FL, you only need to check out the three in Fl for articles not all 37 John Jones who wrote genetics articles.

Be aware that users are often lazy, they would rather just insert a new name than choose from a long list of existing names. So make it harder to insert a new name than to pick one. They have to go through the pick process first before they can enter a new name. We have an application which doesn't even show the button to add a new person until after you have done a search. Since names can have variations consider if you want to use fuzzy logic for your search. You might want to display J. Jones, Johnny Jones and Jon Jones as well as John Jones in your pick results.

Now a lot of this depends on how much knowledge your users have about the author ahead of time. If they know nothing beyond the name, they have no basis to judge between the 37 John Jones you have in the database. In this case it might be better just to accept the duplicates and return results based on a filtering by keywords or whatever you are storing about the article. Is it really necessary to make sure that the articles are ascribed to the correct John Jones, if you really know nothing about the author other than his name? Are you more concerned with the subject matter and name of the article or with having a list of all articles written by John Jones from UVA who is a professor of Political Science?