[Decibel] Akonadi integration use cases

[Matt Rogers]

On Wednesday 18 June 2008 03:01:29 am George Goldberg wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on the akonadi integration for decibel at the moment, and
> have reached the stage where I need to decide what metadata decibel
> will store along side addressbook entries in the form of
> Akonadi::Attributes. I've found this to be just too complicated to
> "sit down and code", so I am writing some usecases which I will use to
> design it. The main concern for these usecases is "what is decibel
> allowed to do to the user's contacts in akonadi?". Please do add any
> more usecases you can think of, as I will make my design for the data
> stored based on these, and I don't want to miss out any functionality
> that should be there. This area is very important to get right
> otherwise we will have a lot of unhappy users!
>
> 1) Adam has two address-books. One contains his personal contacts, and
> the other contains his work contacts. Both address-books are cached in
> Akonadi. Adam is going to use decibel for instant messaging. Many of
> his personal contacts have IM addresses on file in his address book
> already. When he adds a new contact with an IM address to his personal
> address book, he wants it to be added to his IM account's server-side
> contact list automatically, as he likes to keep in touch with his
> personal friends by IM. However, he has a habbit of setting his
> presence message to say rude things about his co-workers, and so it is
> very important that his work contacts are not in his IM server-side
> friends list. Due to the fact his work contacts are stored on an LDAP
> server, other users of that server have added IM addresses to some of
> the contacts, so he needs a way to tell decibel not to add contacts
> from his work address-book to his IM server-side friends lists.
>
> 2) Ben has one Address Book with his friends and family in it. He
> likes to keep in touch with them by IM, and expects that when he adds
> a new contact with an MSN Messenger address, that contact will be
> automatically added to his MSN server-side buddies list. However,
> there are one or two people in his address book, whose IM addresses he
> has, but he doesn't feel he knows them well enough to add them as IM
> buddies, so he wants to exclude them from getting added to his IM
> buddy list by decibel.
>
> 3) Cathy often adds and deletes contacts from her address book. When
> she does this, she wants the altered contacts to be added and deleted
> from her IM server-side buddies list as well - even if she is offline
> at the time when she adds or removes the contact from her address
> book.
>
> If you can think of any other use cases, please let me know! (I'm sure
> I must have missed some)
>
> ---

What happens if a user doesn't have an address book? I, for example, have 
never set up an address book in any PIM app so far in KDE. I don't object to 
Decibel using Akonadi as a storage layer, in that case, but my expectation is 
that I don't have to set up an address book just to use IM via Decibel.
--
Matt