265525 - RFE: private alarms for shared calendars.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 375209

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Aleksey Nogin]

It would be nice if it was possible for users of a shared calendar to attach
"private" alarms to events. This is probably not something that can be easily
added, but it would IMHO be a very useful feature so I think it's worth
considering for long-term.

Our group is using a shared "webcal" calendar (all members of the group have
write access) in which we keep the schedule for the group meetings. Everybody
has a different idea of how important a meeting is, how long it takes to get
ready for it, etc and because of this each user wants to set up their own alarms
for events (for example, user A might want to have an alarm 10 minutes before
event X, 5 minutes before event Y and no alarm before event Z, while user B may
want it some other way). Therefore it would be great if Mozilla provided a
mechanism for adding "private" alarms to the shared calendar.

The "private" alarms should:
- still be shareable (for example, user A should be able to get the same alarm
on her desktop and on her laptop)
- be preserved when an event is rescheduled (for example, if user B reschedules
event X, then user A should still get an alarm 10 minutes before the _new_ start
time), modified or copied.

Comment 1

[Aleksey Nogin]

WRT bug 265516 - I do not necessarily advocate sticking alarms into a seperate
calendar file. I am not too familiar with the iCalendar format, but if it allows
"private" fields in events, then this may be a better way to go (for this RFE,
not for the bug 265516, obviously):
 - This way if whoever reschedules events uses a tool that preserves private
fields, then the alarms will be preserved.
 - This way sharing "private" alarms between several machines (possible
belonging to the same user) becomes trivial.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

One of the problems with the proposed scheme is that often you won't have
write-access to a shared calendar.  One possible alternative design would be to,
for each shared calendar you have access to, make another "annotation calendar"
to shadow it.  This could generically be a storage calendar, but people could
specify a calendar on a server to be used for that too, which would provide for
location independence.  It's not the cleanest design in the world, but it's
something.

Comment 3

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

I'd like to see us use X-MOZ-ANNOTATION properties with X-MOZ-USER parameters to
distinguish my annotations from dmose's on the same calendar.  For read-only
calendars, these could be kept in an annotation calendar, but if we can write to
the calendar (shared ICS, f.e.) then we should be able to "flatten" the
annotation calendar in as well.

We need
a) another bug on the annotation stuff (property naming and storage);
b) a way to tell that my Sunbird-on-laptop and Lightning-on-desktop
   want to manipulate the same annotation pool; and
c) to revisit this one-storage-file-per-calendar thing, I think,
   because having another .sdb per remote calendar I tweak is
   going to make us hurt, I think.

Comment 4

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Reassigning all automatically assigned bugs from Mostafa to nobody@m.o

Bugspam filter: TorontoMostafaMove