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List:       mozilla-ui
Subject:    Re: Address Book sorting
From:       David McCusker <davidmc () netscape ! com>
Date:       1999-08-18 1:15:34
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Tommy Smith wrote:
> Steve Kompolt wrote:
> > Sorting of the adress book can be perfomed by name and email why
> > not phone number, organization or City? why limit this? Any item
> > displayed should be sortable.
>
> @ http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/specs/addressbook/
> 
> please bring back sorting by ORG or PHONE

(Good thing you added the URL for the mozilla spec, or else I would
not have responded to what seems a tech support question.)

Under mozilla we should be able to sort by anything with no problem;
as far as the backend is concerned, it's all the same.

I removed sort by ORG and PHONE in 4.5 for two reasons.  I added a
few other sort indexes, like first and last name, for autocomplete,
and it was easiest to keep the total number of indexes no more than
six in number, for least friction with the existing backend.  So the
first reason was to control the code infrastructure.

The second reason was because every index costs disk space, and an
address book with say 100,000 entries would have been substantially
bigger (many megabytes) with two more indexes.

The 4.5 infrastructure was prepared to cope with very large address
books, and did not have a special case system to do things cheaply
in memory for very small address books (like most folks have).  We
could easily have done things differently if we had designed only
for small address books for average individuals; there wasn't time
to implement both enterprise scale and single user scale systems.

So the answer to the original question of "why?" is: lots and lots
of nested dependencies, and associated runtime cost planning.

David Mc

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