Data Entry In Free-Form Text Fields

Intended Audience and Contact Information

Contact Chief Data Officer, Office of the CIO
Intended audience Internal UBC
UDM Domain All

Purpose

This guideline provides recommendations for data entry of business data in applications. Conformance to this guideline will allow users to identify and relate to the business context, control the usage of invalid characters and to avoid script injection attacks e.g. SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), or Homoglyph. Properly entered data will also result in meaningful reporting and analysis.

Guideline

  1. Use plain language. Any user should be able to see text within a data field in context and understand the meaning.
  2. Letters or ideographs are allowed to use in the input, i.e. American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set. Emoji or mathematical symbols are not allowed.
  3. Abbreviations are not allowed except for approved acronyms that are listed here. Abbreviations can obscure the meaning of a term.
  4. Do not use the ampersand "&" character. Use "and" instead.
  5. Avoid hyphens. Use them only if a user would type in a search. If you need to use them as a separator, put a space before and after the hyphen.

Resources

Data Governance and Business Intelligence Team.