Let's Make Up Business Requirements!
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What sort of requirements would have necessitated the instructions for entering values into these fields?
How likely do you think it is that they have a validator that enforces the rules?Have you seen any weird data entry requirements? Share them with us!
(I thought we already had a thread like this, but I can't find it. My search-fu is apparently insufficient to the task. If someone else wants to find it and flag this for jeffing over to it, that's fine with me.)
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Enter your address with only letters and numbers
Well, I guess my old address at flat 2, 10-14 Newton road wouldn't have been accepted then
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@jaloopa said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Well, I guess my old address at flat 2, 10-14 Newton road wouldn't have been accepted then
That doesn't sound like a Pennsy or even a US address, so it would be correct to reject you and your funny address.
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@djls45 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
(Enter only the Box number in the field. PO Box can be used in addition to the street address, but cannot be used as the only address.)
That's weird, I guess you would put the full PO Box address in there, which makes it look out of place. My PO Box has a different zip code than my physical address (in fact, I think most PO Boxes do). Just make two sections, you lazy Web designers. Physical address and mailing address, with a checkbox indicating the former is also the latter.
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@boomzilla said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@jaloopa said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Well, I guess my old address at flat 2, 10-14 Newton road wouldn't have been accepted then
That doesn't sound like a Pennsy or even a US address, so it would be correct to reject you and your funny address.
In the US it would be a single address number with either an apartment number on a second address line or as a continuation of the first. I used to live on a second-floor "apartment" which was basically just the second-floor of a house that was separated off and given separate external access, and I always just had to write the address as "### X Street, Floor 2" and have the mailbox labeled as such.
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@djls45 It's PA. Are you in ANY way surprised?
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@e4tmyl33t said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
I used to live on a second-floor "apartment" which was basically just the second-floor of a house that was separated off and given separate external access, and I always just had to write the address as "### X Street, Floor 2" and have the mailbox labeled as such.
I just recently moved from one of those (though the second and third floors were split to two "apartments") to one side of a duplex townhouse. The first is listed with the Post Office as "Apt B" for its street address, and the other is listed as "Unit 2" on our lease, but "Apt 2" with the PO.
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@djls45 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@e4tmyl33t said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
I used to live on a second-floor "apartment" which was basically just the second-floor of a house that was separated off and given separate external access, and I always just had to write the address as "### X Street, Floor 2" and have the mailbox labeled as such.
I just recently moved from one of those (though the second and third floors were split to two "apartments") to one side of a duplex townhouse. The first is listed with the Post Office as "Apt B" for its street address, and the other is listed as "Unit 2" on our lease, but "Apt 2" with the PO.
Yeah, in my experience as long as the NUMBER of the unit/apt stays the same and it's clearly labeled, you can refer to it as Apt 2, Unit 2, Number 2, whatever when addressing envelopes and they'll still drop the mail off fine.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@boomzilla said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@jaloopa said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Well, I guess my old address at flat 2, 10-14 Newton road wouldn't have been accepted then
That doesn't sound like a Pennsy or even a US address, so it would be correct to reject you and your funny address.
In the US it would be a single address number with either an apartment number on a second address line or as a continuation of the first. I used to live on a second-floor "apartment" which was basically just the second-floor of a house that was separated off and given separate external access, and I always just had to write the address as "### X Street, Floor 2" and have the mailbox labeled as such.
You had a comma in your address. No quack.
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@e4tmyl33t I did receive mail at our old place that was labeled "Apt B", "Apt 2", "Apt Back", or "Apt Side". Our neighbors had "Apt A", "Apt 1", or "Apt Front". We were really close to the PO, and there weren't really other places that the address could be pointing to, so we got our mail just fine. It's still weird to not have a "One Correct Address" to use for stuff. It seemed like every place that stored our address used a different format.
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@djls45 As long as the street address (name and number) are correct, the carrier can usually figure it out. Especially in your case, where there are only a few apartments at that address. They can also look at the name on the envelope.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@djls45 It's PA. Are you in ANY way surprised?
In Pennsylvania, I lived in an apartment complex, in apartment number 304. My mailing address was 304 Foo St, no apartment number.
Anyone else find that numbering really bizarre? Because a lot of people I gave my address to sure did!
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@masonwheeler said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@e4tmyl33t said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@djls45 It's PA. Are you in ANY way surprised?
In Pennsylvania, I lived in an apartment complex, in apartment number 304. My mailing address was 304 Foo St, no apartment number.
Anyone else find that numbering really bizarre? Because a lot of people I gave my address to sure did!
There's only two ways I can think of that that would make any sense.
- The street was so short it only ran the length of the building, therefore that building was the only thing on the street to be numbered
- The building took up the entire 300-block of a street, and all the apartment numbers were of the 3XX variety.
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To start in on the original topic, maybe the DML that inserts the street address into the database field isn't properly escaped, and rather than correct the DML (maybe a junior wrote it), they decided to add a filter to limit what users could enter.
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@masonwheeler said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
In Pennsylvania, I lived in an apartment complex, in apartment number 304. My mailing address was 304 Foo St, no apartment number.
I lived in a similarly numbered apartment in California.
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@no_1 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Ah, yeah. I remember a long conversation with the developers of a certain Magento plugin who tried to parse addresses using regular expressions. All addresses in the center of Mannheim broke their code. Fun times...
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@masonwheeler said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
In Pennsylvania, I lived in an apartment complex, in apartment number 304. My mailing address was 304 Foo St, no apartment number.
Anyone else find that numbering really bizarre? Because a lot of people I gave my address to sure did!
The only thing close I've seen is if the apartment numbers are letters, you can do e.g. 304B Foo St.
The weirdest address I've ever had was when I was living in an on-campus dormitory at my University; my address was "### <dormitory>", e.g. "304 Foo". No street, no road, etc. USPS recognized it as a perfectly valid address when I plugged it into the ZIP code finder and kicked back a unique ZIP+4, so I guess it was.
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@asdf said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@no_1 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Ah, yeah. I remember a long conversation with the developers of a certain Magento plugin who tried to parse addresses using regular expressions. All addresses in the center of Mannheim broke their code. Fun times...
Tbh though, the address system there is the weirdest one I've ever come across. I'm glad I was there with locals, because I probably would've gotten lost within minutes XD
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@asdf who parses addresses with regex! Name and shame plz.
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Over here it seems like almost everyone incorrectly verifies the post code.
A Dutch post code has the format
1234 AA
. That is, four digits, one space, two letters. Practically everyone puts up a field with a 6-character limit.
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@pleegwat because as any fule kno, space isn't a character, it's a gap between characters...
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@arantor said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
who parses addresses with regex! Name and shame plz.
The UK's addresses are tricky in other ways. We don't require addresses to have numbers, or for there to conform to any format pretty much at all. Sometimes the “street” names are not actually applied to streets either, but rather to blocks, allowing two sides of one street to have totally different numbering schemes. I suppose the nicest thing I can say about the whole mess is that it is “evolved”.
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@dkf said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
We don't require addresses to have numbers, or for there to conform to any format pretty much at all.
IIRC, the only mandatory items are the house name/number (delete as appropriate) and the postcode, and only the postcode has a defined format:
[A-Z]{1,2}[0-9]{1,2} [0-9][A-Z]{2}
. Except for one area in London, where all the postcodes startSW1A
.
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@raceprouk said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Except for one area in London
W1T comes to mind as well.
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@dkf exactly why I asked about parsing with regex, precisely because you can't.
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@arantor said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@dkf exactly why I asked about parsing with regex, precisely because you can't.
True in any instance.
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@arantor said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@raceprouk said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Except for one area in London
W1T comes to mind as well.
Oh, I didn't know about that one. Where's that? I know SW1A is Buckingham Palace and Whitehall IIRC.
Edit: Reading up on it, there's actually quite a few areas like that, and they all seem to be in London.
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@dkf I pity those who tried to find things from the address before smartphones and google maps.
On this topic, I've lived in three places with interesting address schemes.
- Most of the areas in the Baltics start their numbering at one end and on one side (discoursistent which side/end) and increase on that side of the street until the end. If there are N houses on each side of the street, the numbers look like:
1 2 3 4 .... N ------------------ 2N 2N-1 2N-2 .... N+1
while the roads are named. So an address like Brivibas Iela 22 (with long-signs on the i characters) is a valid street address and you have no clue where along the street it is.
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The Mormon-dominated communities (Utah and SE-Idaho for example) have 1-mile NSEW numbered grids for the major roads. It's effectively a Cartesian system which makes it really easy to tell where you are relative to other streets. For example, a street address might be 1050 N 200 E, which puts you 200 grid units (400 meters) east of the origin and 1050 grid units north.
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Gainesville Florida divides the city into quandrants (NE, SW, etc) and has numbered streets. Those ending in Blvd, Ave, and Rd go east-west, Streets (St) go north south. So an address might be 123 NW 13th St, which is different from 123 NW 13th Ave.
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@benjamin-hall said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Gainesville Florida divides the city into quandrants (NE, SW, etc) and has numbered streets. Those ending in Blvd, Ave, and Rd go east-west, Streets (St) go north south. So an address might be 123 NW 13th St, which is different from 123 NW 13th Ave.
OMG now understanding is achieved!
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@raceprouk they are all in London owing to density of addresses in certain boroughs. Good fun when people try to validate that with regex and their 'validity regex' discards valid post codes.
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@arantor Good thing the UK government provides one ready-made:
^([Gg][Ii][Rr] 0[Aa]{2})|((([A-Za-z][0-9]{1,2})|(([A-Za-z][A-Ha-hJ-Yj-y][0-9]{1,2})|(([A-Za-z][0-9][A-Za-z])|([A-Za-z][A-Ha-hJ-Yj-y][0-9]?[A-Za-z])))) [0-9][A-Za-z]{2})$
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@benjamin-hall said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@dkf I pity those who tried to find things from the address before smartphones and google maps.
On this topic, I've lived in three places with interesting address schemes.
- Most of the areas in the Baltics start their numbering at one end and on one side (discoursistent which side/end) and increase on that side of the street until the end. If there are N houses on each side of the street, the numbers look like:
1 2 3 4 .... N ------------------ 2N 2N-1 2N-2 .... N+1
while the roads are named. So an address like Brivibas Iela 22 (with long-signs on the i characters) is a valid street address and you have no clue where along the street it is.
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The Mormon-dominated communities (Utah and SE-Idaho for example) have 1-mile NSEW numbered grids for the major roads. It's effectively a Cartesian system which makes it really easy to tell where you are relative to other streets. For example, a street address might be 1050 N 200 E, which puts you 200 grid units (400 meters) east of the origin and 1050 grid units north.
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Gainesville Florida divides the city into quandrants (NE, SW, etc) and has numbered streets. Those ending in Blvd, Ave, and Rd go east-west, Streets (St) go north south. So an address might be 123 NW 13th St, which is different from 123 NW 13th Ave.
In several/many places in the US house/building numbers are
- Based on the distance in miles from the "beginning" of the street or some arbitrary intersection.
- With the number being in fixed point without the decimal point present (eg, 2046 may mean ~2.046 miles from the starting point), rounded for convenience and/or the following rule.
- With odd numbers (before decimal point insertion) on one side and even on the other.
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@benjamin-hall said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
1050 N 200 E, which puts you 200 grid units (400 meters) east of the origin and 1050 grid units north
Meters? The fuck? Indiana has a similar scheme, but thousands represent miles, not kilometers - that is, 2000 N is one mile north of 1000 N.
Re: Gainesville, they just borrowed elements of DC's scheme, although DC has some letter-named streets (e.g., K Street).
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@lolwhat It turns out that in Salt Lake City, each grid unit is about 2 meters. That makes 9th street (900 N, for example) one mile from the origin.
In Idaho Falls, where I grew up, it was 1600 units to the mile, so almost exactly 1 meter per unit. 17th street was one mile from 1st street.
So it's not exactly 1 meter, but close enough for government work. Oh, and 1-indexed, not 0-indexed. The corner of 1st and Main was the coordinate 0; the next street on either side was 2nd.
Edit: derp, math is hard.
Further edit: As I recall, there was strong European influence (from converts from England and France) in the design of SLC. The downtown area at least was strongly planned in advance.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
OMG now understanding is achieved!
The more you know – 00:07
— chimpchimpo
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@djls45 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@e4tmyl33t I did receive mail at our old place that was labeled "Apt B", "Apt 2", "Apt Back", or "Apt Side". Our neighbors had "Apt A", "Apt 1", or "Apt Front". We were really close to the PO, and there weren't really other places that the address could be pointing to, so we got our mail just fine. It's still weird to not have a "One Correct Address" to use for stuff. It seemed like every place that stored our address used a different format.
You had exactly one standardized, correct address. Mailers that engaged the services of professionals like WtfCorp were likely sending to it (unless that standardized address is so far off from the address they had on file for you that the Post Office's standardized algorithms for figuring that shit out couldn't figure it out - in which case, you probably got way less junk mail because only legitimate mailers will actually send in spite of a failure there).
For discounted rate mail, the PO requires that you standardize the addresses through software that implements those algorithms (natch the PO doesn't actually offer the software themselves, they just certify third party implementations). But if you pay full postage rate for that particular piece, they'll accept literally any address and take their best shot at delivering it using local knowledge. Your mail was coming in to the local PO and some poor human was looking at it and going "Oh. That place again" and manually sorting it into that carrier's load.
Fun fact: The full zip code is 11 digits, and every single delivery point has it's own unique one. There's the familiar 5-digit zip (which is roughly the service area of a particular post office), the 4-digit extension (which gets you to anywhere from a particular city block to a specific room, or in the case of PO boxes, to a particular PO box) and a 2-digit delivery point code (which is exactly one mailbox/slot/whatever). The full 11-digit version is never written out, it only appears in barcodes, but if I whack a barcode on a piece of mail and COMPLETELY FORGET TO PUT THE ADDRESS ON, it'll get delivered. They'll revoke whatever the hell discount I applied for on that mailing, because I inconvenienced the poor SOB that has to actually get it in the right mailbox, but they'll deliver it.
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@lolwhat said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@tsaukpaetra said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
OMG now understanding is achieved!
The more you know – 00:07
— chimpchimpo
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@weng said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
the PO doesn't actually offer the software themselves
That doesn't make it easy to find the "right" address format for a given delivery point, though.
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@weng So the PO does provide it?
That's useful, if I can remember to use it.
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@raceprouk said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
the only mandatory items are the house name/number (delete as appropriate) and the postcode
In some places, there's only one address for a particular postcode. Also, the post office have a bit of a history of making very goot attempts to deliver to addresses like "the last house on the left, some weird little lane outside Cardiff, Wales"
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@djls45 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Have you seen any weird data entry requirements? Share them with us!
Probably elsethread though.
Also "What's your name":
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The only problem is that Bill Burr didn’t really know much about how passwords worked back in 2003, when he wrote the manual. He certainly wasn’t a security expert.
Then why was he put in charge of password policy guidance?
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@raceprouk said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
The only problem is that Bill Burr didn’t really know much about how passwords worked back in 2003, when he wrote the manual. He certainly wasn’t a security expert.
Then why was he put in charge of password policy guidance?
guvmnt, duh.
:-P
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@lolwhat said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Re: Gainesville, they just borrowed elements of DC's scheme, although DC has some letter-named streets (e.g., K Street).
Letters go East / West,
lettersnumbers go North / South. When the letters run out they start using words that start with the letters (possibly multiple times per letter but possibly not, e.g., Alton, Albermarle, Butterworth, Brandywine, Chesapeake...). States go diagonally. Many traffic circles. Many traffic "circles." Other streets at random orientations. One way sections of streets at unexpected intervals. Potholes everywhere.
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@boomzilla said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
Letters go East / West, letters go North / South
Why mention directions at all then? :P
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@benjamin-hall said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
I pity those who tried to find things from the address before smartphones and google maps.
Try the addresses in central Tokyo. Building numbers are per block, and advance in order of construction of the buildings.
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@dkf I've heard (ok, seen in anime) that navigating the older areas of major Japanese cities is a nightmare (even with handheld GPS due to the funky system and all the buildings)
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@djls45 said in Let's Make Up Business Requirements!:
@weng So the PO does provide it?
That's useful, if I can remember to use it.They provide it for one address at a time for no approved use. For businesses, it's utterly useless.