CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I know there is value in constraining values for the Individual Prefix (Dr., Mr., Ms., etc.) and Individual Suffix (Jr., III) fields, but am currently working on some sites where having an ordinary freeform text input field would be preferable.

We have a significant number, for example, of academicians, members of Catholic religious orders, and military officers. It is one thing to add "Rev." and "Hon." to the prefixes and "MD" and "Esq." to the suffixes, quite another to try to represent dozens of military ranks and hundreds of different post-nominal initials representing academic (D.Phil, Ed.D, etc.), professional (CFA, P.Eng), and religious credentials (O.P., S.J.) and affiliations. It would be quite unfriendly to browse through when completing a contribution form, if nothing else.

We have considered creating a custom field, but this isn't exactly trivial either, as we need to find every instance where the built-in fields are used and suppress them, and then provide the custom field.

If the input cannot be made unconstrained, I wonder if we could use a different widget; instead of radio buttons or a drop-down box, to use an autocomplete field instead.