Proposing existing values for "name" field

[diyoyo]

Hi,
is there a way to lookup for already existing names used for an entity before allowing the user to create a new one?
The goal is to avoid redundancy or typos.
One option would be to just stop submission if name is close to an existing one. Another option is to perform auto-completion as the user types so that he/she realizes that it already exists.
Thanks.

[esforim]

Only way to do lookup is to create an entity and use it in a relationship manner which just mean more work and more coding to make it look right.

Autocomplete doesn't work effectively unless you have a small list, once it get large it is very difficult to maintain. And only Admin can add in permanent auto-complete option, and not all field type support auto-complete.

I don't quite know how to solve this issue yet, there is a "duplicate" before create check mechanism, but it only work for default entity and creating a duplicate check for custom entity can be difficult without knowing codes.

My rules of thumbs which is still a manual system is to do a search with a wildcard container "%" for example "test%" or "%test%" before creating new one, not unless I know (based on memory) I haven't added create the record before. But it can be unreliable at time, I notice a few duplicated, forcing me to merge the record and now I have a missing gap in the Filenumbers (auto-number field)