Difference between real Full Name and concatenation of First and Last?

[mcichelli]

Using the upload wizard for Contacts (which has worked nicely for me), I have found a mystery about how contact names are handled. If I upload into FullName, it splits the name into FirstName and LastName, BUT ... If I start with a name like William D. Smith, I get "D. Smith" as the LastName. This isn't right. Maybe I could load "William D." as FirstName and "Smith" as LastName. But what about, "William D. Smith, Jr." vs "William D. Smith, Sr."

Temporarily, I have added a custom field called "printable_name" which holds "William D. Smith, Jr." Then I split the name apart myself, before the load, and loaded up "William" as FirstName and "Smith" as LastName. I am displaying the printable name on the DetailView and the EditView of Contacts - along with LastName temporarily. What, and where, do I modify to automatically update FirstName and LastName when a change is made to my printable name field?

OR - am I missing something basic about how SugarCRM works with contact names?

I have just updated to Version 4.5.0c (Build 1155) running on Windows. I encountered this problem running 4.2.0c.

[mcichelli]

OK - I've solved my problem with more experimentation. SugarCRM actually handles names quite nicely IF you split the name into First Name and Last Name and feed these to the Import Wizard. I split the names just before the last name. E.g. for a name like "Thomas A. Jones, Sr", I split it into First Name = "Thomas A." and Last Name = "Jones, Sr".