Re: Use case for a "case insensitive equals" qualifier
Re: Use case for a "case insensitive equals" qualifier
- Subject: Re: Use case for a "case insensitive equals" qualifier
- From: OC <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2016 17:29:52 +0100
Ha, this reminds me of one old problem I've bumped into and did not find a solution yet.
FrontBase contains a CaseInsensitive.coll1 collation file, which would work just about perfectly... if it supported all accounted characters. Alas, it does not; therefore, whilst a case insensitive like with e.g., "é" works, with e.g., "š" it does not.
I've tried to write to the FB support long ago, but got no answer.
Does somebody perhaps either have a proper CaseInsensitive.coll1 for FrontBase, or at least a description of its format, so that one could fix the file oneself?
Thanks a lot,
OC
On 25. 2. 2016, at 2:12, Chuck Hill <email@hidden> wrote:
> If you always want the comparison to be case insensitive, then you should be able to specify a database collation for the column that is insensitive. Then just just a regular equals qualifier. If you want it case sensitive sometimes and insensitive others, that is a different problem.
>
> Chuck
>
> From: <webobjects-dev-bounces+chill=email@hidden> on behalf of Lon Varscsak <email@hidden>
> Date: Wednesday, February 24, 2016 at 5:08 PM
> To: Paul Hoadley <email@hidden>
> Cc: WebObjects Development <email@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Use case for a "case insensitive equals" qualifier
>
> Hmm, it would be interesting if there was an alternative, but really the problem lies in the database. Any wildcard type searches (at least that start with a wildcard) are not likely to use indexes and cause a table scan. If your database supported the concept of having case-insensitive indexes, then I would think it would be pretty trivial to implement in your own qualifier. In Sybase (the database I use mostly) you can create a functional index (an index based on a function), but it’s the equivalent creating a second column that’s always lower and maintaining an index on it. The difference being that the database maintains it for you (which is usually annoying for EOF).
>
> I’ve always wanted a better way to do this too.
>
> -Lon
>
> On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 5:13 PM, Paul Hoadley <email@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Say you have a web application where the login identifier is the user’s email address. This works in the conventional way: the user supplies that address at sign-up, and it serves two in-app functions: login identifier, and actual email address to which notifications can be sent. This is a fairly common pattern among some large, modern web apps.
>
> It turns out that not everyone understands case sensitivity. We are seeing login failures in the wild because a user that signed up as “email@hidden” is now trying to log in with “email@hidden”, or vice versa. Here are some facts:
>
> 1. It would seem to be at least reasonably common for modern web apps that use email addresses as login identifiers to ignore case at login time. (For example, I tested a couple I had open in browser tabs: Strava and Bitbucket ignore case.)
>
> 2. Although the domain part of an email address is case-insensitive, my understanding is that the relevant RFCs suggest that you shouldn’t make assumptions about the local part. While everything I’ve read claims that in practice it will make no difference, let’s assume that we need to preserve the address as entered at sign-up. (It’s fail-safe to do so, whether we strictly need to or not.)
>
> So, 1 is our aim: ignore case on the login identifier at login time. But because of 2, we don’t want to, say, normalise the email address given at sign-up to lower case and just store that, on the off chance that it makes a difference for mail delivery for that particular user. (Again, it probably won’t, but let’s assume that it could for the exercise.)
>
> What are our options for finding the right User entity at login time?
>
> 1. We can jump in and naively use a CaseInsensitiveLike qualifier, but then a user can stick ‘?’ and ‘*’ wildcards in the input. We could strip those out, but they’re actually both valid characters in the local part. I stopped short of trying to escape them, as this route is starting to seem a little dangerous.
>
> 2. We could track both the supplied and a lower-cased version of the identifier in separate attributes. This has the advantage of presumably working, but it’s awkward, requiring special attention to changing the normalised attribute when the user-supplied one changes.
>
> Can anyone suggest a better way? What I really need is a CaseInsensitiveEquals qualifier, like Java’s equalsIgnoreCase(). Is there such a thing? Would it be easily implemented?
>
>
> --
> Paul Hoadley
> http://logicsquad.net/
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
> Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
>
> This email sent to email@hidden
>
> _______________________________________________
> Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
> Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
> Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
>
> This email sent to email@hidden
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden