when adding a new candidate, prompt with similar candidates that already exist

[mhl]

When people who stood in one constituency move to stand in a different constituency in the next election, it's easy for people to add a new record for that person without realising there's already one in the database.

One way to help stop this happening this would be to add an additional step after submitting new candidate data, which presents close matches (and information about where they previously stood for election, etc.) and prompts people to check whether they're the same or not. If they are, the existing record's memberships are modified, otherwise a new candidate is created.

For this to be more of a help than a hindrance we'd have to make sure that there are stern warnings about checking that they really are the same.

[zarino]

My initial reaction here would be to copy the typeahead_response feature in Alaveteli: When the user finishes typing a name for their new candidate, you do a quick ajax search for similar names, and return a list of any matches. Like so:

The down-side is this requires javascript on the end-user's machine. If that's a major problem, you could instead just ask for the person's name in the "Add a new candidate" form, and then people would submit, be taken to a new page which shows any potential matches, and has the traditional user editing form below it.