227211 - LDAP Auto complete should let us show custom fields in the window

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Scott MacGregor]

If you use LDAP lookups in mail compose, we currently show the cn and the email
address in the list of replies. We should be able to do what 4.x does and
support the ability to show other fields like department or organization in the
drop down list. 

This allows large companies to see which John Smith they really want to send
mail to. 

cc'ing Dan in case we already support this and I just don't know what the prefs
are.

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

We support this, it's just not very-well documented.  The fix happened (and is
mentioned briefly in) bug 89198.

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/compose/resources/content/MsgComposeCommands.js#832
is where the relevant code starts.  The prefs mentioned here with .autoComplete
in their name are of particular interest.  Chances are good that tweaking
.autoComplete.commentColumn possibly in combination with
.autoComplete.commentFormat will do just what you need.

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/addrbook/public/nsIAbLDAPAutoCompFormatter.idl
 has documentation on the syntax.

Note this syntax is going to require some (hopefully backward-compatible)
tweaking in order to fix bug 187642.

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

awesome! Thanks Dan.

Comment 3

[Scott MacGregor]

Note for M4 customer:

These two prefs worked for me. I choose cn as my test attribute to use in the
comment field.

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.*servername*.autoComplete.commentFormat", "[cn]");
user_pef("mail.autoComplete.commentColumn", 2); 

I ran into one problem with this. At least in thunderbird, the comment does not
show in the first auto complete instance in the window. It does show up in
subsequent rows. See Bug #227903.

I'm curious if this problem exists in Seamonkey too.