CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

This forum is a more appropriate place for this question than the issue tracker. I've closed your issue there, and you can continue discussing it here if you wish. My answer there was:

The search bar goes off "sort name" not "display name" so you'd need to enter "Smith, Bob" not "Bob Smith" as your search term.

I've actually been meaning to start a discussion about this for some time. I'm not sure what the historical reasons are for searching on sort name rather than display name but IMO it should be the other way around. So when I wrote the webform-civicrm module that's exactly what I did (the "existing contact" widget always searches on and displays "display name" while using "sort name" only for ordering the results). So far no one has complained about that. Would anyone complain if we made it work that way in core too?

Here are the pros of each I can think of. Hopefully others will weigh in:

Status quo: search by, order by, and display "sort_name"
- Keeping as-is would require no code or documentation changes
- Displaying by "sort name" in the list makes the alphabetization more obvious

Suggested change: search by and display "display_name", sort by "sort_name"
- It's more intuitive to type "Bob Smith" - as a new user it took me quite a while to figure out I had to type "Smith, Bob" (including the comma) to get an exact match
- Display name is more robust - by default it includes prefix and suffix while sort name does not. Helps with disambiguation.
- Display name is intended for display and therefore better suited for being the "display value" of a contact-reference field (displaying sort name looks weird to my eye)

1. we'll need to add an index to display name

2. any reason why we cannot search on both?

lobo

Agree with display name. Would be nervous about performance on both given how slow that search can be but I imagine it would be an option in the existing search preference setting

Why do I think we could keep using sort name?

As Eileen noted the quicksearch can actually be quite slow. 

I think changing to display name will severely reduce the effectiveness of the autocomplete list and hence slow down searches even more. (We have found that it is quicker to type in more letters and select from the auto-complete list rather than fewer letters, hit enter and then be taken to a page of search results.)  This will definitely be true for those if us who have disabled automatic wildcard on the search settings page, as suggested to improve search performance. For others I am not so sure.

We don't get consistency in how names are presented to us.    The person with display name Mrs Margaret Smith may communicate with us a Mrs Margaret Smith, or Margaret Smith, or Maggie Smith or Meg Smith or Peggy Smith or ?  At the moment I can start typing in smith, m... and I rapidly get to a point where I can select her from the autocomplete list. (We display sort name, email address and postcode in the autocomplet list)  It is also quick to change from smith, p to smith, m if I can see she is not on the autocomplete list.

If I was searching by display name the auto-complete list would be of no use to me.  If I type in anything other than Mrs Margaret Smith she won't appear in the autocomplete list.  I would have to type in m smith, hit enter and search for her in the page(s) of results.  If she contacted us as Peggy Smith and I searched for p smith, hit enter and found she wasn't in the results, I would then have to do another search with m smith.

Do the "display value" of a contact-reference field and the form of the name used for searching have to be the same?

Rather than searching on both display name and sort name, is making it a configurable setting an option?

Or would having to look up that setting every time a search was run negate the possible performance savings of not searching on both?