Generating User Names

[richardmac]

OK, since I got such an awesome answer on my last question, I figure maybe it wouldn't hurt to ask this one. And I promise, I will contribute here once my level of knowledge has gotten up higher!

I work for a school district with 70,000 students. I do district server level stuff, and I've already got old rev scripts working behind the scenes to do lots of different things. But here's something I'm struggling with.

We're trying to generate unique user names for our students, based on a combination of names, parts of their student ID number, and parts of their birthdate. We can't use the whole student ID number OR birthdate because we're not allowed. So I'm trying different things.

I wrote a script that puts all 70k names, birthdates, and id numbers into a variable (one student per line,) then uses a repeat loop to go line by line through the variable and determine how many dupes there are. To overly simplify, it's this concept:

repeat with i = 1 to 70000
if listOfUsers contains userName then
put return & userName after theDuplicates
else
put return & userName after listOfUsers
end if
end repeat

This works totally fine, but takes a while to run. Is there a faster way to do this?

[bn]

Hi richard,

I propose to use an array to filter out the duplicates. This seems at first counterintuitive. But have a look.

You use the list of all the users (including duplicates) to build an array. You use the line with the user information as the key to the array and add 1 to the content of the array. Then you will have a number in the array: a one if the user is unique and 2 or more if the user was a duplicate.
There are several ways to do this but I think this is the fastest and once you get the idea it is a very nifty way to find duplicates.

And I use 'repeat for each line aLine in tData'
"Repeat for" just goes through a list takes one line at a time, puts it into the variable 'aLine' and you can do something with the line. Livecode does not have to find the line each time around. With repeat with i = 1 to x Livecode counts through the lines to get to the line number.
Then you let your routine search 70.000 times through the whole content whether it has a duplicate. All this takes a lot of time.

the field "fAllUsers" is supposed to contain all users with duplicates.

Code: Select all

on mouseUp
   put field "fAllUsers" into tData
   put "" into tArray
   repeat for each line aLine in tData
      add 1 to tArray[aLine]
   end repeat
   put the keys of tArray into tAllUsers
   -- optional sort
   sort tAllUsers
   repeat for each line aUser in tAllUsers
      if tArray[aUser] < 2 then 
         put aUser & return after tListOfUniqueUsers
      else
         put aUser & return after tListOfDupUsers
      end if
   end repeat
   
   delete last char of tListOfUniqueUsers -- a return
   delete last char of tListOfDupUsers -- a return
   
   put tListOfUniqueUsers into field "listOfUniqueUsers"
   put tListOfDupUsers into field "ListOfDupUsers"
   
end mouseUp

try this and see if it works for you. I dont know the exact format of your user id, but I guess it should work as a key for an array.

regards
Bernd

Edit: I appended the bare-bones stack with the script above.

[mwieder]

...and even without the array, the "repeat for each" form is *much* faster than the "repeat with" form.