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Concatenation is Easier than Parsing

By DANIEL ANTION posted 08-14-2013 17:14

  

OK, the title didn’t scare you away, so that gives me some latitude in getting close to the weeds on this, but here’s some good news – that’s as bad as it’s going to get. I will start with a little bit of a rant about the technology industry though.

Why, after all the years that we have had computers working behind the scenes do we continue to have to deal with two fundamental failures? Failure number one – why do we still suffer with the lack of baked in, comprehensive date math and logic capabilities? Failure number two – Why do we still have to assemble addresses from the various bits of address stuff?  There, end of rant.

Given that the industry seems determined to not solve these problems, we need to take appropriate action. As the title suggests, as bad as building addresses from First Name, Last Name, Address Line 1 through Address line (n), City, State, Zip and or Country, Province, and so on, it’s easier than busting apart what amounts to a small paragraph of information about a contact to create those attributes.

Always, always always always store complex information as a series of component parts.

Earlier today I discovered hundreds of contacts spread across several contact lists, where the metadata columns of ‘City’ ‘State’ etc. were removed and the entire mailing address was pasted in. I realize that this approach probably solved a mini-crisis when it was taken, and I realize that the then future use of the missing metadata was unforeseen at that time. Still, I am making arrangements to have a programmer parse a series of paragraphs into buckets of metadata, and that is both time consuming and imperfect. The result will be a list that will require a manual look-see and, no doubt, many manual corrections.

Going forward, these lists will work like this:

·         Enter the contact’s name components

·         Enter the contact’s company components

·         Enter the contact’s address components

·         Save

Whether it’s a new contact or an update, a SharePoint Designer workflow will examine the component parts and assemble the requisite ones into a readable useful address. Short of an automated give-me-this-guy’s-mailing-address feature on the Ribbon, this works pretty well.

This is today’s issue De Jour, but we have a few similar issues. Documents that are being managed where we would like to have an abstract, document libraries with so many documents that we now wish we had some (metadata) way of sorting, filtering, counting, grouping and perhaps even deleting batches of them. The reason we have these issues is because we didn’t consider that we might have these issues when we implemented SharePoint. I’ll take the blame for that, that’s what you get when you want “adoption” more than you want “ECM” and we went through that phase.

Today we are all about doing it right, thinking ahead and building sustainable, useful collections of documents and list items for our future coworkers to slip into their daily routine. If you’re not doing that, you’re giving a future version of me a headache. 



#sharepoint #SharePoint #metadata #workflows
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