1764184 - Feature request: handle CardDAV categories/groups

Status: ASSIGNED

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Jérémie Parisel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:99.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/99.0

Expected results:

Hello there,

I would love to be able to see and manage my caldav groups (also known as categories - I'll use both words indifferently) of contacts within the Address Book.

I'm thinking of a equivalent of what can be done using TB-Sync add-on in conjunction with its counterpart "Category Manager".

This would include ability to:

• Filter contacts by category (example: https://github.com/jobisoft/CategoryManager/blob/TB91/screenshots/catman002.jpg)
• Send e-mail to a group
• Edit categories a contact belongs to within the Address Book (adding a contact to an existing group or a new one, removing them from one or all groups,...)
• Edit categories on multiple contacts at once

Thank in advance for considering it.

Comment 1

[Vincent Bernat]

It seems there are two ways to handle groups: categories (CATEGORIES: in each vcard) and vCards (KIND:group and MEMBER: in a dedicated vcard). Some information are available here: https://github.com/mstilkerich/rcmcarddav/blob/master/doc/GROUPS.md.

Comment 2

[Bruno Pagani]

CATEGORIES is the most important one, that’s what most implementations actually use. This is the only feature that seems missing to me to be able to switch from CardBook (my address book add-on for years) to the native implementation now that Thunderbird 102 landed a renewed address book.

Comment 3

[Alexander B.]

(In reply to Bruno Pagani from comment #2)

CATEGORIES is the most important one, that’s what most implementations actually use. This is the only feature that seems missing to me to be able to switch from CardBook (my address book add-on for years) to the native implementation now that Thunderbird 102 landed a renewed address book.

Think so too - to filter an address book, this is really valuable! I use it frequently.

Comment 4

[tooor]

I vote also for this feature.

Comment 5

[Heike H.]

+1

Comment 6

[Michael]

So I would also vote for those missing groups . A very handy feature as seen in add on Cardbook.
Also categories are missing as available in CardBook.

Comment 7

[Matt]

Aleca, do you have this in your new address book work anywhere already?

Comment 8

[John Bieling]

Is there an RFC which defines the Category field for vCard v3 or v4? If so, the first step would be to add support for it in the UI.

Comment 9

[Jérémie Parisel]

Categories in VCards v4 are defined here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350#section-6.7.1
(v3 here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2426#section-3.6.1)

Comment 10

[Alexander Bergmann]

Besides CATEGORIES as mentioned by Jeremie, there are also MEMBER and KIND for groups in v4.

For Android there is an free and opensource app DAVx5 (formerly named DavDroid) to synchronize calendars (CalDAV) and contacts (CardDAV). They use X-ADDRESSBOOKSERVER-MEMBER and X-ADDRESSBOOKSERVER-KIND for v3 - see manual page. This is actually also what the add-on CardBook uses for v3.

Comment 11

[John Bieling]

The MEMBER is something for Bug 1668791.

Let us keep this bug for Categories. Since it is a property per contact, it should be added to the list of editable properties in the address book. Adding functionality to use Categories as lists in TO or CC is a second step.

Comment 12

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We definitely want this, not sure how soon but definitely before next ESR.
We should regroup and define an action plan to properly implement it. Having categories/tags would solve soooooo many issues with mailing lists and would make the address book very very usable with large amount of data.

Comment 13

[Alexander Bergmann]

It might also be nice to have a context menu item or toolbar button available in the address book UI, in order to easily add or remove (multiple) contacts to or from a category. I can also recommend to always look at the add-on CardBook for ideas of how it should be presented to the user.

Comment 14

[office]

I hope categories will come soon in the new version - until this, i use the V 91 - i need the Categories in my 4000 contacts. Thunderbird is for me as salesman a great CRM program. And if thunderbird adressbook would be able so search in any fields, it would be even better.

Comment 15

[Claudius]

For everyone interested in the Thunderbird address book who uses a lot of CATEGORIES: there's currently a bug that you might want to be aware of: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1792399

Comment 16

[John Bieling]

Had a meeting with Alessandro and we agreed that I can start working on this.

Comment 17

[John Bieling]

Attachment: Bug 1764184 - Add support for vCard CATEGORIES field to address book UI. r=aleca

Comment 18

[bege10]

(In reply to John Bieling (:TbSync) from comment #16)

Had a meeting with Alessandro and we agreed that I can start working on this.

With respect to the screenshot in the phabricator link:
As distribution lists cannot be synced with Android they have little meaning to me in a CardDAV address book any more.
Therefore they should be replaced with the categories in the tree pane, as it is in CardBook.

Comment 19

[John Bieling]

We do both. CATEGORIES will be used to tag contacts just like we can tag emails. And KIND:group with MEMBER: will be used to sync distribution lists (Bug 1668791). And IIRC correctly, both can sync on Android with DAVx5 (https://www.davx5.com/manual/technical_information.html#contact-groups)

Comment 20

[bege10]

(In reply to John Bieling (:TbSync) from comment #19)

We do both. CATEGORIES will be used to tag contacts just like we can tag emails. And KIND:group with MEMBER: will be used to sync distribution lists (Bug 1668791). And IIRC correctly, both can sync on Android with DAVx5 (https://www.davx5.com/manual/technical_information.html#contact-groups)

Thank you. These options are "either - or" in DAVx5. When one creates a new address book DAVx5 asks which way groups/labels shall be used. When the network address book is configured to use categories as tags, currently on Android I get an empty contact when there is a distribution list in Thunderbird (using CardBook because of the categories).
Will there be a respective setting (or automatic feature) for Thunderbird address books to either show the distribution lists or the categories in the tree pane?

Comment 21

[John Bieling]

That is currently not planned.

Comment 22

[bege10]

(In reply to John Bieling (:TbSync) from comment #21)
A CardDAV address book with categories that does not show the categories in the tree pane does not make much sense for me. Or is there a reason that this feature shall be missing compared to CardBook?

Comment 23

[Lukas.Wringer]

+1 From me. Having this feature in standard Thunderbird and not relying on AddOns would be really helpful to us. Lists are a much wanted and needed feature and having categories as an intermediate (till vCard 4.0 KIND:Group and Member are widely implemented) would help us a lot as sogo dropped its own carddav plugin (which supported lists) after TB 68...

Comment 24

[Philipp Schlesinger]

See also bug 1728770

Comment 25

[Thatoo]

+1 for this categories feature implementation.

Comment 26

[marty]

+1 for the categories field in Thunderbird address book. I use this field a lot, but must go into OwnCloud Contacts to be able to edit the field.

Comment 27

[Robin]

+1 This would be very useful for organising our address books.

Comment 30

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

A patch I'm working on will do most of the back end groundwork for this – a new table in the databases, migration to fill it, and new fields in the interfaces. We'll still need to create the front end in the address book tab, and the ability to compose a message to contacts with a tag. I don't have a timeline for either of those happening, as it's a low priority project for me.

For anybody hoping to use this with their Gmail contacts, I have bad news. Google's CardDAV server does not publish categories (AKA labels in Gmail terms) or accept changes to them, and I don't think the proprietary API does either. So that's not going to work.

Comment 31

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1764184 - Add support for contact tags

Comment 32

[psyamin]

I would like to add a current real-world use case for this feature.
My setup is Nextcloud Contacts as the CardDAV server, Thunderbird Desktop using its native CardDAV address book, and DAVx5 on Android. In DAVx5 I use groups as per-contact categories, which is also how Nextcloud Contacts represents contact groups.
These groups/categories work consistently between Nextcloud Contacts, DAVx5/Android and CardBook. I am currently trying to replace CardBook with Thunderbird's native CardDAV support.
Native Thunderbird CardDAV otherwise works very well for me: contact photos, birthdays, postal addresses, phone numbers etc. synchronize correctly and contacts can be edited.
The remaining important limitation is that existing CATEGORIES are not exposed in Thunderbird's address book UI. Therefore I cannot see which groups a contact belongs to, filter contacts by group, or add/remove contacts from those groups.
I also tested editing an unrelated field of a contact which belongs to two Nextcloud groups. Both categories remained present on the CardDAV server afterwards. So for this Nextcloud/DAVx5 use case, the missing part appears to be primarily the Thunderbird UI/tag support rather than preservation of the category data.
For this workflow, CATEGORIES are important independently of KIND:group / MEMBER distribution lists. A category/tag view similar to CardBook, together with the ability to assign/remove categories for one or multiple contacts, would make Thunderbird's native CardDAV address book sufficient for this setup.

Comment 33

[Ingbert]

I opened bug 1728770 "vCard CATEGORIES support for CardDAV address books" more than 5 years ago, found to be a duplicate of bug 1764184 "Feature request: handle CardDAV categories/groups" about 9 months ago.

I'm still on Thunderbird 91.13.1 with Category Manager 5.1 because newer versions don't let me handle categories as easy as the old version.

My setup is like the one of psyadmin: Nextcloud Contacts as server, TB Desktop with CardDAV address book, DAVx5 on Android. Everything is working and syncing fine - but I don't like to update to a newer TB version because I would loose the nice handling of categories...

Is there any chance this feature will be included in the future?