92321 - Make the view pane editable in addressbook (edit contact data/properties inline from AB quick search results, preview of selected card(s))

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Address Book, enhancement)

Description

[marlon bishop]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010720
Netscape6/6.1
BuildID:    

Background: We desperately need to streamline some of the repetitive tasks
involved with editing, entering, and mainaining contacts in AB.  This is
especially important for enterprise users, middle to upper management corporate
types who spend large portions of their day with their contact lists.  

Problem:  Editing an AB entry involves a number of double clicks, clicks and tab
flips to get to, and edit data.  Why not allow people to directly manipulate the
data as they see it before them on screen, in the view pane.

UI Solution: Enable users to edit contact data inline, displayed in the view
pane.  There are several workable designs for doing this, and i think it would
strengthen the all-around Email component, adding a great deal of efficiency to
the process, and ease the migration from other applications.

Idea 1: Use an edit icon located in each header, to the right side, which
toggles an editable field entry on all of the data in that section. This will
allow users to focus and navigate to each field. If a user clicks outside of the
editable region, or goes away to another window, the edit mode would toggle off,
to avoid accidentally overriding data in the active field.

Technical Solution: Right now, the view pane is not XUL, it is probably HTML. 
And it is unlikely that inline HTML editing exists, however not for certain. 
Any other ideas to accomplish this would be appreciated.  Ideally, if we could
leverage XUL here, we'd be able to implement the interaction design and behavior
neccessary to make the feature concise and well understood.

Comment 1

[scottputterman]

reassigning to racham

Comment 2

[Caspy7]

I like this bug.  It makes the user not have to bend over backwards every time 
they want to edit data in a contact.  I'm unsure if it would be possible, but I 
think the optimal way of doing this would be handling it as a certain 
very dominant PIM does it.  Simply click on the text one desires to edit and 
that one line pops into edit mode.  Once it has lost focus, save the change.

Other very handy features would be tabbing from one text area to the next and 
aligning all editable text areas vertically.  As it is now they are simply 
dependant on the size of the labels.  It is much easier for the eye to pick out 
what the sought after information is from the label when all the information is 
vertically aligned.  Again, the above said PIM handles this well also.

Because this bug involves altering the view pane format.  I would also suggest 
fixing label consistency.  To see this in action make a new address card and 
fill in *EVERY* possible text box.  Now looking at it in the view pane we see 
that some entries receive labels and some do not.  

For consistency and clarity all entries should have labels and should be 
vertically aligned.

Comment 3

[jglick]

*** Bug 138165 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 6

[naught]

Just a clarification. On https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570113 , Thomas stated:
"the [existing] summary could still be useful for copying data which becomes harder when it's all editable fields"

At the moment in thunderbird 24 on linux, it's not possible to copy any data out of the address book summary pane - nothing is able to be highlighted, and there is no context menu. All I can do is click the email address to compose a new email..

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to naught from comment #6)
> At the moment in thunderbird 24 on linux, it's not possible to copy any data
> out of the address book summary pane - nothing is able to be highlighted,
> and there is no context menu. All I can do is click the email address to
> compose a new email..

Yes, that's bug 96968, quite old and quite popular indeed (sigh).