456080 - Connection between address book cards and Lightning events (ThunderBirthDay)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 151994

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[Ingo Müller]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1
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I'm the author of the little extension ThunderBirthDay, which displays the birthdays in the address book as events in Lightning. It does so by implementing the calICalendar interface, using the address book as source for the dates. I have some issues related to the birthday fields and Lightning integration. I'm not sure, where to discuss them, so I'll explain them here.

Using the birthday fields as only ressource for calendar events is not enough, as events have more fields than only the date. As a very least, the date when the alarm was last acknowledged has to be associated with it, but in fact, there are a lot more (see http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla1.8/source/calendar/base/public/calIItemBase.idl). As I haven't found a solution yet, alarms are disabled for the moment.

I'm pretty sure that storing all these fields in the addressbook is not a good idea. I thought about storing them somewhere else and connect the two sources with an ID for each card. Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to uniquely and permanently identify an address book card!

1) Do you agree that I shouldn't store these fields in the address book?
2) Does anyone know a possibility to uniquely and permanently identify an address book card?
3) Is there any way to include an ID field to the nsIAbCard interace?

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Can we hold this discussion in bug 151994, that was originally raised for linking lightning & address book and has a very old patch. I'm happy if we need to spin off further bugs, but I think we need to start there rather than have two bugs doing the same thing to begin with.