227206 - Support pasting of email addresses from a spreadsheet

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

If you have a mailing list that lives in a spread sheet such that each address
is a cell in the spread sheet, you should be able to select the cells, copy and
paste them into the compose window. 

The compose window should break out one address per line in the compose window.

I'm not sure what happens if auto complete needs to run on some of these items.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: initial patch

Here is an initial patch used to accomplish this. Things to note:

1) After the user pastes this large chunk of data into the addressing field, we
wait till they hit enter before breaking the addresses down and inserting them
one by one back into the addressing widget.

2) If, after hitting return, the current line contains a comma, then we know to
invoke this new code which processes a block of addresses and auto completes
them. No comma, falls back to the current auto complete behavior.

3) The editor change: unfortunately editor terminates the paste after the first
new line since we are pasting into a single line text box. This hurts us in
this case because our names are delimited by new lines. I had to add a new
state to the edit text rules (with a pref) which replaces all newlines with
commas instead of truncating the pasted text. 

4)I currently use the mime header parser to examine the block and decide the
list of addresses contained within the block which should then be auto
completed. If you type "David, Scott, Peter Smith", the parser treats spaces as
delimters when figuring out what addresses are there. In this example Peter and
Smith would both be auto completed. I think I should get rid of the mime parser
and just tokenize after commas, treating each comma as the delimter of an
address. 

5)If a name resolves to multiple matches, we take the first one and ignore the
rest. There is no warning or dialog prompting you to pick the right match.

6)If there are no matches at all, we fall back to appending the default domain

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: updated patch

LDAP and AB auto complete now abort when the string contains a comma (just like
they currently do when the string contains an @ sign)

Properly tokenize the block of addresses by ',' instead of using the message
header parser. 

This means that now: "John Smith, Scott, Peter"
will get broken into:
John Smith 
Scott
Peter

before we would do:
John
Smith
Scott
Peter

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

Comment on attachment 137676 [details] [diff] [review]
updated patch

I'll remove the references to msgHeaderParser that I added and no longer use
before checking in. 

This can be checked in for both seamonkey and tbird. However it will not work
for seamonkey because newlines won't get converted to commas as mentioned
earlier. But there will still be some benefit to seamonkey as users can still
enter a bunch of comma separated names on one line and we'll now exercise this
new code.

I will of course get module owner review for the editor changes.

Comment 4

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: cleaned up patch

Note: There feature does cause one regression. If you drag an AB card whose
display name contains a comma into the addressing widget then we incorrectly
break that name into two and look up each half. 

i.e. "Smith, John <[e-mail]>" will cause problems if DRAGGED onto the
envelope from the AB. It works fine if you get it as an auto complete match or
if you use the contacts side bar and click Add To.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Comment on attachment 137713 [details] [diff] [review]
cleaned up patch

looks good. What about Mozilla, re the pasteNewlines pref?

Comment 6

[Scott MacGregor]

I spun off Bug #229203 for the editor specific change so that can get a separate
module owner review from team editor.

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

Attachment: updated patch for addressingWidget.js

this updated patch fixes supplemental Bug #229179 and Bug #230241

Comment 8

[Scott MacGregor]

marking as fixed. this won't work in seamonkey until 229203 gets fixed but we
have a separate bug for that issue.

Comment 9

[emmet]

Scott, this bug fix sounds like it may also resolve Bug 85655 (copy & paste into
TO: line ignores addresses after a CR). Super!

Comment 10

[Scott MacGregor]

yes it fixes it for thunderbird but not for seamonkey. Seamonkey needs Bug
#229203 to make that work. 

Comment 11

[[e-mail]]

Two issues:
1. Tabbing no longer navigates, so that if you scroll up to the top of a long
list and tab through it it won't scroll through the list
2. "Properly, Quoted" <email@addresses> shouldn't be affected, but they are.

Comment 12

[Scott MacGregor]

I already have a bug to track issue #2, let's use a new bug for issue #1 and 
leave this one closed.

Comment 13

[Scott MacGregor]

Neil, issue #2 is Bug #230577

Comment 14

[Scott MacGregor]

*** Bug 232234 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***