1336357 - Flexible Address Book source for ‘Contact’ in ‘Quick Filter’

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Óvári]

Attachment: QuickFilterContact.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0
Build ID: 20170127014032

Steps to reproduce:

This enhancement bug relates to ‘Contact’ in ‘Quick Filter’.

Please enable add-ons the ability to change the Address Book source of ‘Contact’ such as:
CardBook by Philippe Vigneau
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/
CardBook synchronises with local and remote contacts and has other features that are not available in the current Address Book.


Other add-on which could benefit are:

TotalQuickFilter by alta88
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/totalquickfilter/

Expression Search / GmailUI by wang opera
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/gmailui/

quickFilters by Realraven (Axel Grude)
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/quickfilters/


Apparently abandoned add-ons:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/contacts-sidebar/
http://extensions.sanjer.nl/?page=tb_cs


May relate to:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298438


Thank you

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

hi ovari21. In bug 564148 comment 5 you suggest linking this to bug 564148, but I'm not sure it fits the guidelines set out in bug 564148 comment 1. If you disagree, please offer more information.

Comment 2

[Óvári]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk, NI for questions) from comment #1)
Enterprises can store contacts in a central location (eg OwnCloud, NextCloud, Zimbra, etc)

Enabling the “Address Book source of ‘Contact’ in ‘Quick Filter’” being modular would enable Thunderbird to access other sources which would be beneficial to enterprises.
* bug 564148 comment 1: This (enhancement) bug is of “high value” in the sense that it provides significant return in user productivity and improvement in product management as filter contacts based on the Contact’s central store.

I understand that the CardBook add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/
* Enables accessing remote contacts (eg. OwnClould, NextCloud, Gmail, Zimbra, …).
* Is based on open internet standards
* Drastically improves contact management
* Has a focused developer who is:
--- developing the CardBook add-on full-time (Monday to Friday during work hours)
--- implementing many suggestions
--- fixing any bugs
--- working on maturing the CardBook add-on to enable replaced the default Address Book in Thunderbird
* bug 564148 comment 1: This (enhancement) bug should impact a non-trivial percentage of enterprises as best as one can evaluate or guess (use your own good judgment of what constitutes non-trivial, but the minimum definition is the numbers affected should well exceed your own institution). The growth in the numbers moving to CardBook in the last year is shown here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/cardbook/statistics/?last=365

Hence, assistance in enabling the ‘Contacts’ in ‘Quick Filter’ to be modular to source another address book to the default Thunderbird Address Book would help enterprises.

It would also help when CardBook is mature enough to replace the current default address book as testing the ‘Contacts Quick Filter’ feature before more people use it.

Perhaps “Address Book source of ‘Contact’ in ‘Quick Filter’” could be discussed how to implement this enhancement bug at the Thunderbird Meeting:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/StatusMeetings

It would also help rkent’s vision:
“Thunderbird’s Future: the TL;DR Version”
http://mesquilla.com/2014/07/31/thunderbirds-future-the-tldr-version/
_Where We Need to Go_
* Thunderbird should be a full-featured desktop personal information management system, incorporating messaging, calendar, and *contacts*. We need to incorporate the calendaring component (Lightning) by default, and *drastically improve contact management*.
* We should be actively promoting open internet standards in messaging, calendaring, and *contacts* through product implementations as well as advocacy and standards development.

It would be appreciated if you would set the status for this bug to NEW.

Thank you

Comment 3

[Óvári]

Added rkent to CC as referred to his listing at comment #2.

Comment 4

[alta88]

This is, of course, very useful if plugin addressbooks are to be supported. And even more so for an enterprise environment.  The CardBook author pinged me for advice and hoping to do it in an extension with js, but that's just not possible without backend quickfilter changes (and some quality architecture).

Comment 5

[Óvári]

Hello Jörg,

Do you know who is able to look at the backend quickfilter architecture in Thunderbird to enable plugin addressbooks to be supported via js extension?

Thank you

Comment 6

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

I'm afraid given the current resources and skill set of the team members, there's little chance to get this moving. As far as I know, Kent is the peer for filters, but we asked him for help on another filter bug (body filter, bug 1259534) and he didn't have time; well, to fix that bug, it would need a complete rewrite of the filter backend.

As for the address book, there are various movements to implement a new one, see:
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-November/date.html
Thread: Thunderbird vContacts -- Move to a modern Addressbook
https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/tb-planning/2016-December/date.html
Thread: Nightingale - Nascent Contacts project under Thunderbird

I'm counting at least four: The current TB address book, the vContacts prototype, Kent's project and of course CardBook, which is real here and now.

All that said, perhaps you can get help from Alta88.

Comment 7

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Maybe Kent can comment.

Comment 8

[Philippe VIGNEAU]

in fact, what would really help is to have the possibility to override the filters IsInAB and IsntInAB...

Comment 9

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

You know more about it then I do. Surely we'll review a patch if you send one.

Comment 10

[alta88]

I haven't thought about it in great detail, but one way to do this is similar to how custom columns are implemented in msgDbView. Meaning any extension can register its own function and the backend will run the function, along with any others that are registered, as well as the existing mork based code, to return an aggregated yes/no result for the results list.

Comment 11

[Kent James (:rkent)]

There is an existing capability to add custom search terms and filter actions to Thunderbird, see nsIMsgSearchCustomTerm.idl Looking at the carddav addon it is already using that capability.

This bug deals specifically with quickfilters, not search and filter. That is a front-end UI issue, and not an area that I have primary responsibility for, not much experience with (though I did try to modify that, but I could not get my ideas past the UI people).

I've looked at the CardDav addon, and I did not see any evidence that it was really adding a lower level address book type, but mostly patching things at the UI level. But it is hard to figure out, since the addon code is completely without comments, not a single one I could find. Perhaps if the addon really added a normal directory, it would not have this issue. But I am not sure.

(Aside: IMHO it is really a pity that this much work is being done without an attempt to make the addon code readable by others, nor following standard coding practices used in Mozilla. The code is also under GPL which is not compatible with Thunderbird. Collaboration, proper testing, proper documentation, MPL or more lenient licensing, are all part of making this usable as the default Thunderbird address book. These are not features that can just be tacked on at the end. So I just want to make it clear that this addon shows no sign of being on a path to replacing the default address book in Thunderbird. There is more to production code than just working.)

So I have no direct insights into how to add an extension capability here, though I have added capabilities to other code in the past.

Comment 12

[Philippe VIGNEAU]

I've not spent time into commenting because I've continuously rewritten very large parts of my code... until recently, I've no clear ideas of what should be done for the UI and for the datas, and especially how to do it... for example, I've understood how works an observer two months ago, and four years ago I didn't know a word of javascript ! :O) ...

now CardBook starts to be usable, I will invest more time in cleansing... understood.

Comment 13

[Óvári]

(In reply to Kent James (:rkent) from comment #11)
Bug 1372580 comment #6