Alternate City Names

[drewroberts]

I'm running into an issue with Cities (#18) where there will be a number of them with multiple spellings or variations and I don't want to have multiple entries in the database and splintered versions of the City. Here's an example:

• St. Louis
• Saint Louis
• STL

We will already have East Saint Louis and unincorporated areas of the City in the database and I don't want multiple variations of the actual city name. By not allowing user input and forcing all Address input to run through Google Places Autocomplete (#30) we are eliminating some of this problem. I do need to find out the variation that Google Places uses for the City name and maybe still provide some alternates in a separate table similar to the approach with Alternate Email Addresses on the User model (TIPOFF/authorization#20).

[joshtorres]

• basically we want it to do a firstOrCreate([]) search for all versions and save the short_name if none are found
• Keep a log and send a notification when we have to create a new city name so we know to double check (since we should have them all)
• create a function to merge one city into the other one (moving over foreign keys, etc)
• what would be really cool is if we create an issue to insert the city into the database migration and start a pull request (make the change if possible)