275485 - Allow users to reorder Address Books

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 158062

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Bob Lidral]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0

This is a Thunderbird issue with Netscape history.  I'm actually asking for an 
enhancement.

I upgraded Netscape from 4.72 to 7.2 a couple of months ago.  When I did, 
Netscape re-ordered my Address Books.  They're still sort of alphabetic, but 
they start in the middle and wrap around.  That is, the last 26 Address Books 
are "Personal Address Book", "Collected Addresses", and then the first 24 
Address Books from my old Netscape 4.72; the first 15 Address Books correspond 
to the last 15 in my Netscape 4.72 Address Book.  The original order 
was "Personal Address Book" followed by the rest of the Address Books in 
alphabetic order because I moved them around to be in alphabetic order.  Note: 
this reordering was done by the Netscape upgrade.

Some time later (2004/12/17), I installed Mozilla Thunderbird and imported the 
Address Book from Netscape 7.2.  It faithfully reproduced the Netscape 7.2 
Address Book order.  In other words, the order is still wrong but it matches 
that of the Netscape installation from which it was imported.

I haven't tried, and therefore don't know, what Thunderbird would have done 
had I imported the Netscape 4.72 Address Book instead of that from Netscape 
7.2.


Requested Enhancement: Please allow users to reorder Address Books.  Netscape 
4.72 supported a drag-and-drop reordering.  That is, in 4.72 if I selected an 
Address Book, dragged it up or down the list of Address Books, and then 
released it, Netscape 4.72 would leave it in the new location.  Neither 
Netscape 7.2 nor Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 supports this (and, yes, I've already 
requested this of Netscape through their feedback).

P.S. Your Address Book importation works better than Netscape's.  Netscape 
mangled the names of some of my email folders that contained special 
characters when it imported them from 4.72 to 7.2.  Mozilla Thunderbird got 
them all correct without any name mangling.  Thanks.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Attempt to move any Mozilla Thunderbird Address Book to a different 
position in the list of Mozilla Thunderbird Address Books.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Nothing.  No Address Book could not be moved from its existing position in the 
list of Address Books.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla Thunderbird should have supported drag-and-drop movement of Address 
Books within the list of Address Books.

Comment 1

[OstGote!]

xref Seamonkey Bug 158062

see bug 272940 too

Comment 2

[Tom Metro]

(In reply to comment #0)
> Please allow users to reorder Address Books.

There is a workaround for this problem.

Experimentation with Thunderbird 1.0.2 shows that the order in which address
books are displayed is controlled by two things:

1. The order in which they appear in prefs.js, with the exception that the
"Personal Address Book" (pab) always appears at the top.

2. A 'position' property (i.e. ldap_2.servers.pab.position), which can override
any ordering set by rule #1.

So for example, adding:

user_pref("ldap_2.servers.pab.position", 1);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.Clients.position", 2);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.Vendors.position", 3);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.MailingLists.position", 4);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.history.position", 5);
user_pref("ldap_2.servers.Obsolete.position", 6);

to my prefs.js resulted in my preferred ordering.

Comment 3

[Tom Metro]

FYI, order in which address books are searched is a related problem for which I
have created a separate bug report: bug #292153.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Bug 158062 is now core address book & is the same as this one, therefore duping 
to that bug

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 158062 ***