CUCC Expedition Handbook - Peoples' names design options

What, How and Why : Peoples' names

Names: Why it is a problem

The former system completely failed with names which are in any way "non standard". Troggle ccouldn't cope with a name not structured as "Forename Surname": where it is only two words and each begins with a capital letter (with no other punctuation, capital letters or other names or initials).

There were 19 people for which the troggle name parsing and the separate folklist script parsing were different.

Names: Maintenance constraints

We have special code scattered across troggle to cope with "Wookey", "Wiggy" and "Mike the Animal". This is a pain to maintain.

Names: How it works

Fundamentally we have regexes detecting whether something is a name or not - in several places in the different types of raw data. However we do now use unique 'slugs' for the references between pages (since Sept. 2023).

Four different bits

Frankly it's amazing it even appears to work at all.

In urls.py we used to have re_path(r'^person/(?P[A-Z]*[a-z\-\'&;]*)[^a-zA-Z]*(?P[a-z\-\']*[^a-zA-Z]*[\-]*[A-Z]*[a-zA-Z\-&;]*)/?', person, name="person"), re_path(r'^personexpedition/(?P[A-Z]*[a-z&;]*)[^a-zA-Z]*(?P[A-Z]*[a-zA-Z&;]*)/(?P\d+)/?$', personexpedition, name="personexpedition"), re_path('wallets/person/(?P[A-Z]*[a-z\-\'&;]*)[^a-zA-Z]*(?P[a-z\-\']*[^a-zA-Z]*[\-]*[A-Z]*[a-zA-Z\-&;]*)/?', walletslistperson, name="walletslistperson"), where the 'transmission noise' is attmpting to recognise a name and split it into <first_name> and <last_name>. Naturally this failed horribly even for relatively straightforward names such as Ruairidh MacLeod.

We now [October 2023] have path('person/<slug:slug>', person, name="person"),
path('personexpedition/<slug:slug>/<int:year>', personexpedition, name="personexpedition"),
path('wallets/person/<slug:slug>', walletslistperson, name="walletslistperson"), which is a lot easier to maintain.

Troggle folk data importing

Troggle reads the mugshot and blurb about each person. It reads it direct from folk.csv which has fields of URL links to those files. It does this when troggle is run with python databaseReset.py people

Troggle generates its own blurb about each person, including past expeditions and trips taken from the logbooks (and from parsing svx files) A link to this troggle page has been added to folk/index.htm by making it happen in make-folklist.py

Troggle scans the blurb and looks for everything between <body> and <hr> to find the text of the blurb (see parsers/people.py)

[This now seems to have have been fixed (July 2023):

Folk: pending possible improvements

Read about the folklist script before reading the rest of this.

This does some basic validation: it checks that the mugshot images and blurb HTML files exist.

The folk.csv file could be split:
folk-1.csv will be for old cavers who will not come again, so this file need never be touched.
folk-2.csv will be for recent cavers and the current expo, this needs editing every year

The year headings of folk-1 and folk-2 need to be accurate , but they do not need to be the same columns. So folk-2 can start in a much later year.

folk-0 will be for awkward buggers whose attendance spans decades. This needs updating whenever one of these lags attends: AERW, Becka, Mark Dougherty, Philip Sargent, Chris Densham, Mike Richardson

Currently (July 2023) the software ignores folk-0, -1, -2 and we have used the old folk.csv for the 2023 expo. But we hope to have this fixed next year...

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