[Decibel] Fwd: Brainstorming for what contact-data decibel should store

[George Goldberg]

  On Wednesday 23 April 2008, George Goldberg wrote:
 >  > A DECIBEL CONTACT is supposed to represent one individual person.
 >  > General information about that person is stored in it, as well as any
 >  > number of IM ACCOUNTS. IM ACCOUNTS contain information specific to
 >  > individual instant messaging accounts held by the contact.
 >
 >  How does this integrate with the persons stored in akonadi?

 Well, after my discussion with the Akonadi developers last month,
 there was only one solution that seemed viable (in th absence of
 khaliki or whatever it was called). I hope my understanding is correct
 :)

 Normal address book contacts are cached in akonadi, but are not
 actually stored there. They are stored in vcards on disc. So, we can't
 directly add our data to the conact. However, we can add our data as a
 serparate Akonadi::Item and create a link between them, to indicate
 they represent the same person.

 There is also the possibility that we can store it as an extra
 sub-item of the main contact item, but I'm not sure whether this would
 stop us using akonadi to persistently store it.

 I'm not entirely clear what IM contact data is already stored by the
 addressbook, but I'll investigate that now.

 Another issue is that akonadi::item unique id's are not ints, so we
 can't use the contact-handle int in decibel as the akonadi ID of the
 item... We could of course create a dummy one, but doesn't this defeat
 the point of using a int handle for local contacts?


 >  So far I thought of Decibel having a simple mapping between
Telepathy handles
 >  and an Id that refers to the entry in Akonadi. That entry already has IM
 >  account data as well as phone numbers, etc., even with one preferred entry
 >  being highlighted!

 Perhaps the contact-connector can take care of looking in the akonadi
 address book data and matching contacts there to IM contacts... This
 area still needs a lot of thought, but I'm keen to get our Decibel
 contact roughly built first before dealing with how to determine which
 real contact each account goes with.


 >
 >  We will need to store additional statistical data:
 >  Friend with, last seen, status, status message, maybe a "total
seen count" to
 >  find the preferred accounts of friends.

 OK.

 George