1123426 - Feature Proposal: Contact Information Message [Communications/Contacts Share Activity] for SMS

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::SMS, enhancement)

Description

[Mozilla_BEC]

Not every target can accept MMS, and not every target handles vCard files fine. Furthermore, sometimes the target doesn't wish to import the content of the vCard into their phone, but rather make quick use of contact information.

For that reason, I'm hugely fond of the Contact Message type for SMS.

Contact Information Message: This is an incredibly valuable feature for me and can really be invaluable if you do business using your phone. The dumbphone accomplishes this by launching the Contacts app, wherein the user then selects a single contact to import info from. The app then puts a selection check box next to each field of recorded information about the contact, and the user ticks the boxes they want and presses OK.

This copies the data field name and value into the SMS/MMS like so:
First Name: Bob
Last Name: The Builder
Cell Phone: [phone]
Email (Personal): [e-mail]

In this manner, the user can choose exactly what fields they want/need to send to the other party, and the party can make immediate use of the information as it is presented as plain text within the body of the SMS, avoiding any issues with MMS or platform incompatibility with vCard.

The target's platform will take care of making sure the Phone Number and Email content in the Contact Information SMS is clickable by the user, which results in a pretty nice workflow.

Comment 1

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Mar 16)]

Yes, I agree that dumbphones support this, and I like this as well.

I _think_ we have an old bug about this too.

Jenny, what do you think?

Comment 2

[Mozilla_BEC]

I think the bug you're thinking about was my first submission to BugZilla a long, long time ago. I had made a massive, long, drawn out bug and you advised me to break it up into pieces and submit each one individually.

Well, I'm finally getting caught up :P

Comment 3

[Jenny Lee]

Hello Brett,

I agree with what you proposed here, but function wise, sharing selected contact info as plain text is different from sharing a vCard that's intended for the receiver to import. We need to further consider how user access the 2 functions and how the flow might be.   
However, like I said in the other bug, given the major changes in plans for FXOS, the UX team will evaluate all feature after v3 planning, which will have a strong impact on future versions of FXOS. So we're gonna have to put this in backlog for now and see if we can move forward with this later. Thanks for understanding and proposing the idea!

Comment 4

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Mar 16)]

Jenny, a possible UX could be this:

1. share a contact from the contacts application
=> we have a MMS with a vcard attachment
2 [review]. tap on the attachment
=> a menu appears, there is a "convert to text" item
3. tap on "convert to text"
=> the attachment is converted to a text format.

I agree that with v3 we might change a lot of things, but this should not prevent us from moving forward with small improvements like this. I don't think v3 will change this. This can also be a great bug for a contributor :)

Comment 5

[Mozilla_BEC]

Julien,
Could we perhaps put it in the top ... menu where we access the Subject field and other message related things?

I do agree, we need a workflow for BOTH MMS/SMS forms of these types of attachment messages.

Comment 6

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Mar 16)]

IMO the top menu is not a good place to put this, because we can have several attachments, and we wouldn't know which attachment would be affected by the action.
Because attachments have a menu and I think it's a good place to have the option.

Comment 7

[Jenny Lee]

Hi Julien,

I like the flow you proposed =) At step 1, user can also attach contact from the attachment button in SMS. 
My only concern would be 1) the function won't be that easy to discover and 2) the layout of text is gonna be a little tricky. But overall, I think this would be our best solution.

Comment 8

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Mar 16)]

Great, I'm making this a mentored bug then. I think this is a great bug for a contributor !

When running inside Firefox Nightly following [1], the thread "052780" has MMS containing a vcard at the start of the thread, so it's quite easy to test the feature.

[1] https://github.com/julienw/gaia/blob/1082618-sms-readme/apps/sms/README.md#how-to-run-the-application-in-firefox (And if bug 1124141 is not fixed, add '&& false' in the condition in /shared/js/l10n.js line 1656)


I think we'll need a VCardParser (probably one exists in the Contacts application that we could reuse) to extract the data from the vcard, and decide a format to replace it with. The format in comment 0 sounds good to me as a first step, then we can make it better in following bugs if necessary.

Comment 9

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Mar 16)]

Mass closing of Gaia::SMS bugs. End of an era :(

Comment 10

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Mar 16)]

Mass closing of Gaia::SMS bugs. End of an era :(