Unable to enter apostrophe for customer last name

Manager SE specific technical issues
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GUTHTIRE
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Unable to enter apostrophe for customer last name

Post by GUTHTIRE »

Unable to enter an apostrophe for the lastname when creating a New Customer. Ironically, it appears that you can change the customer name, once created, and enter an apostrophe.
(Shop Management 8.2.1.81)

Example: D'agustino
Dan
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Re: Unable to enter apostrophe for customer last name

Post by timbre4 »

Historically, the apostrophe (') character has been reserved for programming and therefore pressing the ' key does nothing. We have recommended using a different key that IS a legal character to use as it is very similar:
tilde.png
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Tim McDonnell -
Sr. Product Market Mgr / Forum Moderator / Mitchell 1 Media Developer
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Re: Unable to enter apostrophe for customer last name

Post by GUTHTIRE »

I suppose a tic/grave accent could be used however a customer name rarely uses grave whereas customer names frequently have apostrophe's. You can change a customer name to add an apostrophe after it's created. It just opens things up to confusion when trying to find a customer in the system. Did they type a grave, apostrophe, or neither as they may not have been aware of the grave as a substitute. Seems to me that in this particular case it should be allowed when creating a new customer unless of course it creates some kind of sort issue later on with reports or elsewhere.
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Re: Unable to enter apostrophe for customer last name

Post by timbre4 »

Here's the deal; when we offered the previous version (which ended as Manager 5.9 - built with MS Access), the apostrophe was verboten since it was reserved for programming. It would crash the program under certain circumstances.

When we created Manager SE (built with SQL) we re-used code elements or created new ones that mimicked Manager 5.9 behavior to reduce user pain in transitioning over to Manager SE. As a result, this is why you cannot type an apostrophe during field entry. While not an illegal character (programming) in SQL the rules in the code persists. It's true that you can possibly copy and paste text with apostrophes into name fields but most users are not going to do that. I've discussed this with the team and we're not going to change the way it works because there are too many potential problems introduced with doing so for an issue this minor.

We suggest that you audit customer names for apostrophes (enter %' to list them) and put the alternate character in place. Thus, no confusion as all your customer names will be listed the same way.
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