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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    Re: Addressbook
From:       Don Sanders <dsanders () cch ! com ! au>
Date:       1999-06-30 0:20:22
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On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Rik Hemsley wrote:
> On 22-Jun-99 Don Sanders wrote:
> > I started programming an outlook express style addressbook GUI (minus the
> > LDAP
> > directory service, digital certificate and internet conferencing stuff) last
> > night, should be a piece of cake. I would like to use your backend to store
> > the
> > data in vCard format once I am done (probably in a month), does this sound
> > ok?
> 
> Yup. Should have it working by then. It's getting there...
Progressing on schedule here. Had a slight change of plans and decided to use
some MS Outlook style dialogs for creating/modifying an address book entry. But
are sticking with the Outlook Express style dialog for searching/browsing the
addressbook.

I have a couple concerns at this stage:
1) I wonder how close can I make it look to MS stuff before they sue me?
I figured it would be okay as long as I don't copy the icons. Should I rename
widget labels as well? What else? I was thinking of uploading screenshots
somewhere and then asking for suggestions for improvements on kde-devel (the
more feedback the better).

 2) How can we support groups in the addressbook?
As far as I can tell Kab doesn't support groups
Teodor worte (correct me if I wrong):
"For the card format I would suggest vCard 3.0. Maybe you should have a look
at [RFC2426]. It has all the features Kab lacks and could be easily
organized into card folders...
Anyway, it would be nice to have some CORBA-based directory service with
vCard groups stored in recursive folders."

I'm not to sure about this using groups stored in recursive folders stuff, does
it allow one person to be in multiple groups? (I think not)

3) Address ids.
What if an application wants to store a list of addresses. It could
store the names of people but what if there are multiple people with the
same name? Perhaps we need an id for each addressbook entry.
(This is an issue even if the addressbook itself wants to maintain a persistent
list of entries, say when creating a group of entries). I don't expect that the
kab "AddressBook::Entry" class can be serialized (that is saved to disk and
reused) something to ask Mirko about.

4) I'm not supporting all the vCard fields
That would just make the UI bloated (please speak out if you disagree). I'm
also not supporting the same ones kab does. I do intend to support custom
fields like Outlook does. kab doesn't support custom fields at the moment, but
the kabAPI (kdelibs/kab/kabapi.h) looks like it is suitable for supporting
custom fields (or keys in kab termininology), because the it has a single
method that can be used get any field, that is

  ErrorCode getEntry(AddressBook::Entry& entry, string& key);

Is this a bad idea? Should I just stick with supporting a subset of the vCard
fields intially? Does the vCard format allow for custom fields?

4) Selecting a preferred addressbook GUI.
I'm all for allowing mutiple address book UIs, but this means the user must be
given a way of picking the preferred UI. The same issues with preferred
colo(u)rs and keyboard accelerators come into play here
(ie we should allow for system/user/application specific scopes). 

5) How should we combine our stuff.
I'm thinking of starting with my own very simple address book stub class. And
then deriving a new class for the kabapi class. We would have to agree on names
for all the vCard fields, (I mean the exact string used as a key to retrieve a
particular value).

6) kab segfaulting
Hmm, kab is segfaulting at startup on my Solaris machine at work (kde 1.1). I
wonder if it can be made to work on Solaris. (My kab version is pretty old).

7) Standard widgets
I ran into problems, I need a combobox widget containing all countries and a
validating date edit box. I want a dialog to validate an address, the MS one
has US specific crap like STATE and ZIP code I hate that, I guess it has
state/province zip/postal code too. Have to work on these.

Damn, I really did only intend to make a couple of points here but things got
out of hand.

I will e-mail Mirko Sucker asking him to subscribe to the list, and
telling him that we have been talking about addressbooks on kde-pim and looking
at improving/replacing kab in particular. I'm fairly keen on improving it
having now looked at it a bit, I don't want to unnecessarily redo work.

I guess I will mention that:
1) I am working on an alternative GUI  
2) Rik is working on vCard parsing support and importing of other addressbook
formats. The kab help mentions that vCard support is intended so he should be
cool with that.

What the heck I cc'd him. Hope this was the right thing to do. (Hi Mirko)

Bye for now,
Don.

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