Duffbert's Random Musings

Document Number:  1084571

Problem
When you have a mail-enabled form, and you press F9 or send your mail, you will often be prompted by a dialog box which states, "No match was found for name" or "More than one match was found for name" succeeded by a list of names in a dialog box.  Why does this occur?

Content
Soundex evaluates the entry in your SendTo field (or CC or BCC) and returns these messages if it finds either no match at all or multiple matches in the ($USERS) view of your Home server's Name & Address Book (NAB).

The first column of this view is sorted and categorized.  Each category represents a value.  When a recipient of a mail message is found under a category with only one entry, there is success.  When it is found, but only under categories with multiple entries, you are presented with the "More than one match was found for name" dialog box (and the dialog box displays the records from all of those categories for you to choose from).  

Person records each have several values, so they appear in several places in the ($USERS) view.  They each appear under their:

FirstName
LastName
FullName
CommonName
ShortName
@Soundex(LastName)

Group records appear only once, under their:
ListName

Note: Actually, the formula is slightly more complicated than this.  For more detail, it is recommended that you to examine the formula in the first column of your ($USERS) view.

Note:  In the 4.6 and 5.0 NAB templates, a Group's ListName is also processed by @Soundex.

How do these multiple entries/values for Person records, and the single entry/value for Group records, affect the user?

Suppose you have people named Bob Vytar, Vytar Smith, and groups called Vytar, Vytar Group, and Group Vytar.  If you type Vytar into the SendTo field of a memo, and then press F9, it will display both Person records and the group, Vytar.  It will not display the other two group names.  If you type Vytare in the SendTo field, and then press F9, it will display with Bob Vytar only.  This is because there wasn't an exact match with any record, but there was a Soundex match with the LastName of Bob Vytar (see the list of ways the ($USERS) view is sorted and categorized above).

Additionally, if you search for a name by typing "Bob L" to find Bob Long, a name such as "Jack Lee" could potentially be returned.  This occurs because when no exact match is found, soundex is used.  Namelookup utilizes the last name of the person you entered, in this case 'L', and does a search for L000 since "L" is the only letter of the last name that you entered.  Looking in the $Users view of your Domino Directory, you will find that there is an entry for L000 that matches with Jack Lee.  This is based on the soundex coding documented in Technote 1087113, "What Is the Soundex Coding System?".  In order to find Bob Long, you would need to type out to at least the second consonant of the last name, "Bob Lon", because soundex gives vowels a weight of 0.