MailNews:Address Book

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

Information Wanted

We'd like some information on how other products export LDIF files, please head over to MailNews_Talk:Address_Book_Help_Wanted and add some information if you are able to.

Useful Information

LDAP Logging

We've now enabled an LDAP logging facility on trunk builds of SeaMonkey and Thunderbird. More information may be found at LDAP Logging.

LDAP Alpha Schema

Before Thunderbird 1.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0 we made some changes to the Address Book to allow more flexible attribute mapping. Additionally, the some of the default attributes changed, so we've put together an alpha version for the Mozilla Address Book schema find it here: LDAP Address Book Schema

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.

Help Wanted

There are many areas we wish to improve and would like help with, please have a look at the MailNews:Address Book Help Wanted page for more information.

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.
  • Possible relevant link libvcard? http://freshmeat.net/projects/libvc/
• Tidy up and rework of the address book preferences/settings backend - Standard8
  • This includes:
    • removal of redundant code
    • removal of duplicate code/optimisation of existing code.
    • possible moving of pref backend functions from nsDirPrefs into the classes that define the directories themselves as this would be more appropriate.
    • finally the removal of the nsDirPrefs code.
• 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. Note that the above help wanted and work in progress areas apply hear as well...

• 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.
• 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?
• LDAP
  • Writeable LDAP address books
  • MailNews:LDAP and Large Searches