384908 - LDAP Server addressbook feature request: new way of looking for the contacts

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: LDAP Integration, enhancement)

Description

[Martin Konečný]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; cs-CZ; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.2-1.1 Firefox/2.0.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.0 (20070326)

In our company we have many employees and it is often difficult for users to look for the appropriate contact in the results of Thunderbird Addressbook LDAP search.

Often it would be much more better to get all the people employed in some department of our company.

Would it be possible to include the feature, which would make possible to show automaticaly organizational units (e.g. the objects with objectClass: organizationalUnit) and after clicking one of the organizational units it would automaticaly show all the contacts which are the children of this object?

e.g I have this ldap directory structure:

o=my,dc=company,dc=com
|
|
+ou=users
| + uid=Peter
| + uid=Michael
|
+ou=departmens 
 +ou=itdep
 | +cn=Peter
 | 
 +ou=accountaningdep
   +cn=Michael

ou=departments if the container object, which contains the list of all departments in my company.  

ou=itdep and ou=accountaningdep are those two departments (these are e.g. the objects of ldap objectclass: organizationalUnit).

Every department then contains its employees. In this example there is only one
employee in every department (employee is e.g. object of ldap objectclass: person).

Object "ou=departmens,o=my,dc=company,dc=com" is set as base DN in my Thunderbird configuration.

It would be marvellous, if it would be possible to look for the contacts
in old way: clicking once the LDAP directory and writing the string would return all appropriate results.

But there would be one more possibility:

After clicking "twice" the LDAP directory in my addressbook, Thunderbird would not wait for me to write search filter (to get appropriate results from the LDAP server), but it would automaticaly show all departments (in my example "itdep" and "accountaningdep") and after clicking the department of my choice, it would show all the children objects = contacts (which would have necessary attributes of course).



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
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Comment 1

[IagoSRL]

I think that it's dificult with the current address book system of Thunderbird.
I proposed add the feature to create folders (and subfolders) inside each address book, this can be useful for local contacts and in LDAP accounts can be implemented by create automatically subfolders based in the OU found in the server.
The subfolders can help too when import accounts from another mail programs like Outlook (this already allow create subfolders in contacts).