Personal names in a global application: What to store

Question

Storing personal names in a structured way seems quite difficult when it comes to an application which is used by users from lots of different countries. The application I\'

Answer 1

In general, a name is a human-readable identifier of a person. For a given person, you will need to store one name for each use case of such an identifier. You will need a name to display as part of the postal address; you may need one to use as a "screen name"; you may need one to use in the openning of a letter to the person; you may sometimes need to include titles and honors of the person, sometimes not.

In any of these cases, what you want to display is a single string. You may or may not be able to avoid duplication of effort by storing components of these strings and putting them back together later. But in general, both in terms of national culture and professional culture, you may be better off just storing the full strings.

The same, BTW, largely occurs for postal addresses, except that there are international standards that permit the postal authority of one country to send mail to persons in another country.