MailNews:Address Book

This page is for planning items related to address book part of MailNews.

Under Testing

This is where the address book developers will put stuff that is still under testing before it goes onto [1]

• LDAP Address Book Schema

Help Wanted

We would like to greatly improve the functionality of the address book for both SeaMonkey and Thunderbird. However the developers that are currently working on address book don't have enough time to work on it all themselves. Hence we'd like some help. --Standard8 05:08, 9 Nov 2005 (PST)

If you'd like to help with something, come and talk to us on [2]

The main areas we would like help in (and hence improving) are:

• VCard implementation
  • Currently, we only support VCard version 2.1 bug 29106. we'd like to extend this to version 3 and look at the possiblities of implementing hCards alongside it.

• Writeable LDAP Directories
  • This is a much requested feature and would be very useful bug 86405.

• Address Book Card Reorganisation
  • The address book card dialog needs relaying out so that it supports lower resolutions better.
  • We would like to increase the number of fields that we support.
  • See below for further details.

• Nesting Mailing Lists
  • bug 40301 This would give greater flexibility for our list functionality.

• LDAP C-SDK
  • We need to look at upgrading to the latest LDAP SDK version to pick up a number of fixes and implement it.

• Other Help Wanted bugs
  • Bugs with the helpwanted keyword - We'll update this list as time goes on.

What's being worked on?

This is a list of things we are currently looking at/working on with respect to address book. These are things known to the MailNews devs, note we'll try to keep the list up to date, but don't guarentee it, and schedules won't apply here - We have limited people for address book and we work on it when we can.

• Drag and Drop fixes (bug 35837 & others)
• Address Book autocomplete transfer to toolkit (WIP)
• Basic vcard redesign work - Mhovis
  • Expand contact database to include a superset of all supported protocols / card versions, including sync tokens.
  • Provide a framework to allow third-party protocols bi-directional interaction with a persistance abstraction layer for the contact database(s). This would possibly use a network of contact observers.
  • Each consumer of the framework would implement a "view" of the abstracted contact persistence layer, adding columns and interfaces to the persistence layer if needed.
  • Translations between the different "views" would have to be considered if inputting from one interface and outputting to another (in essence using the persistence layer) is not sufficient.
• Misc bugs e.g.
  • ldap fixes
  • UI fixes

Short and Long Term Goals

This is a brain dump being written as we talk about it on IRC. This needs much more information/design before any of it goes anywhere.

• Pluggable address books
  • A system whereby extra definitions for different formats/address book interfaces may be bolted onto the main address book code without need for major code rework. (things to remember: device synchronisation)
• Device Synchronisation Interfaces
  • See Device Sync
• Revised back end
  • This is potentially a better alternative to mork see MailNews:Address Book Native Formats for more info.
• Remove nsDirPrefs - this will probably be needed to help pluggable address books.
• Some kind of generic interface for import/export etc of different types of cards and books.

What's being thought about?

This list contains things that we'd like to be able to get round to doing, or have previously been discussing. Again, no schedules and same comments apply as above.

• MailNews:Address Book Interface Formats
• MailNews:Address Book Native Formats
• Relayout the new/edit card dialogs
  • This would be to solve our current screen size issue
  • but would also be in preparation for the addition of more fields
  • MailNews: Address Book Card Fields - what fields do we want?
• VCard - we need to either rewrite this or find a decent library.
  • Anyone looked at libvcard? http://freshmeat.net/projects/libvc/
• Remove nsDirPrefs.h and nsDirPrefs.cpp - they are a real mess and get in the way quite a bit.
• LDAP
  • Writeable LDAP address books
  • MailNews:LDAP and Large Searches

Wish List

What do you want to see in address book? Many wishes/enhancements have been discussed previously.

Please let us use the discussion for what ideas we would like to see address book include in future.