Pim Sprint - KPeople Summary

[Vishesh Handa]

On Thursday, April 03, 2014 01:04:29 PM Aleix Pol wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 3, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in> wrote:
> > 
> > The final idea is for KPeople to install a special Baloo search plugin
> > which
> > would search over all the required databases, aggregate the contacts and
> > give
> > the results. Since everyone is using Xapian to store the index, this
> > should be
> > do-able. Xapian allows searching over multiple databases and collapsing
> > multiple results based on some custom criteria.
> 
> Why can't KPeople do the search?

KPeople will be performing the search and the aggregation. However, we though 
it might be best for it to install a Baloo Search Plugin since they can share 
the same search API.

KPeople can install its own search API if required.

> 
> > --
> > 
> > Another problem is showing extra information during email completion. We
> > could
> > not figure out a solution for this as email auto-completion is a special
> > case
> > which has its own custom database.
> 
> Same, what's the problem with just using KPeople for completion?
> Excuse my ignorance, but what does Baloo have to do there?
> 

The Email auto-completion database is currently created by the Baloo Email 
Indexer. Baloo provides an API to provide auto-completions.

KPeople currently does not have access to that database so it cannot do 
completion. KPeople's main job, IMO, is contact aggregation, and that is what 
we would like to use it for. It's just not obvious how to go about that.
 
In case you're interested, here is why it is slightly complex -

- The Email Contact completion db only contains "Name <email>" fields. It has 
no concept of Akonadi items / contacts.

- In order to aggregate the data one would have to search for the akonadi item 
which matches the "email". This akonadi item id would then be mapped to the 
higher level person id. One would then need to fetch all the contacts related 
to that person, aggregate the data and display it.

- "Fetching all the contacts related to that person" can be causing multiple 
trips to Akonadi, which could get slow.
 
-- 
Vishesh Handa