Best Practice Suggestion: Phone # Extensions
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My gripe of the day:
I call up my cell phone company. My current phone is going bad. They ask for a day time phone #. I say "937-###-#### extension XXXX." Her reply "We don't have a place for extensions."
Grrrrrrr. 
You want day time phone numbers but you don't accomodate that other people work too!
People -- when you program and develop -- be smart about it. I can't use my home phone -- my cell is down about half the time, if not more. This one commonly happens on web sites as well. Not everyone is direct dial.
This goes along with not making your data atomic and normalizing your DB.
I just had to blow off some steam on this one.
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Jim P.A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
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My company has a generic phone number one can call into and if you know the employee's name you can be transferred to the extension. I'm glad I have such an option because I've dealt with the same issue you just ran into.
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley -
When you design inputs for phone number, do you use 4 textboxes and 4 corresponding fields in the database (one each for area code, exchange, 4-digit piece, and extension. ..assuming all US/Canadian phone numbers), or do you use one textbox/db field with a long reg-ex to limit it? Or somewhere in between?
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My thinking is 10 and 4/5. Depending on your FE you're programming in...(and what your needs are) I would program for country code defaulted, if you can pop the cursor for input then a separate area code box from the 7 follow-on. And then 4-5 character extension box. If you can't pop the cursor -- I would do the solid ten characters. You want to make the data entry easy for the person doing the entry.
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Jim P.A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
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