NamesTable.SurnameMP etc columns
I've wondered about the new columns in the NameTable introduced in
version 9 (or 8?) that have column names ending in MP-
SurnameMP
GivenMP
NicknameMP
I did a bit of testing and found that these columns have an 'ASCIIized' version
of the data in the corresponding column without the MP.
Here are several examples-
Surname SurnameMP
Öhring Ohring
Rüb Rub
[wife of Rüb] [wife of Rub]
The Japanese names in my database aren't changed, so ASCIIized is not at
all a correct description of the transformation. It could also involve using
the normalized version of names containing Unicode combining characters.
The columns were not populated at upgrade time, but are filled when a name
is now added or edited.
I haven't checked the many other type of conversions possible, but I thought
that folks may be interested.
The new columns are not declared with a collation, so the
indexes that exist were created using the default binary collation.
I wonder whether this is a move in the direction of eliminating RMNOCASE
in a future release?
Richard
The MP style name columns were there in RM8, but they were not populated at that time. I don't know if they started being populated at the beginning of RM9 or if they started being populated after one of the RM9 point updates.
The activation of these columns has escaped me until now because I've not been adding to my RM database for quite a while and the columns are typically out of view if I'm looking at the NameTable. There are a couple of others that caught my eye tonight that are new to me or I'd forgotten about because they had been dormant:
- Display: defaults to 0; setting it to 1 does nothing obvious
- Language: defaults to empty; does this mean that 13 years after shelving multi-language development, it's coming back?
Quote from Richard Otter on 2024-03-16, 5:37 pmI've wondered about the new columns in the NameTable introduced in
version 9 (or 8?) that have column names ending in MP-
SurnameMP
GivenMP
NicknameMP
I suspect that the Language, Display, and MP Names are all related and the latter signifies Matronymic|Patronymic, an issue that users have had working those Names into the constraints of the current Names structure. That said, it's not obvious how replicating the structure is necessarily going to help but it may be better than using Alt Name.
And the Language field might be a way to declare which character set is used by that Name record.
The Display option would control whether the MP Names are shown. Where we don't know. Would it be either/or or both the conventional or MP?