[Owncloud] Introduction of display names, please take care of it in your Apps!

[Tornóci László]

On 01/29/2013 09:13 PM, Bjoern Schiessle wrote:
> Hello,
>
> with this merge request[1] we will introduce display names in ownCloud5.
> If the user back-end supports display names you can define random names,
> different to the login names, as display names.
> Currently the LDAP-Back-End and our database back-end supports display
> names. Both implementations are part of the merge request.

Let me mention that this came up during the discussion of an issue on 
github: https://github.com/owncloud/core/issues/1176
I made this suggestion just 12 days ago! I am really impressed by the 
speed the developers respond to issues & requests! If you keep working 
like this, owncloud has a really bright future IMHO.

Just one more thing: group display names should also be introduced some 
time later, too. That's not as important as display login names, but it 
would be nice to have, too.

				Yours: Laszlo
>
> If you are the author of a user back-end which also knows the concept of
> display names feel free to add it to your ownCloud implementation.
>
> The display name will be used in various places as your primary name,
> e.g automatically generated mail, sharing dialog, etc. It is only used
> to represent the user in the various interfaces. For internal reference
> we continue to use the login name.
>
> This means that if you use the name of the user only for internal
> purpose, e.g in the database, to access the data folder, etc nothing has
> to be changed. If your App also displays the name in the UI, in mails,
> etc than you should change your App to retrieve the display name instead
> of the login name. Therefore we introduced some new functions:
>
> OCP\User:: getDisplayName($user=null)
> -> returns either the display name of the current user or of the user
> (login name) given as parameter
>
> OCP\User::getDisplayNames($search = '', $limit = null, $offset = null)
> -> lets you search for a specific display name and returns an array with
> the login name as key and the display name as value
>
> Both function behave the same as OCP\User:: getUsers() and
> OCP\User::getUserNames();
>
> In most cases it should be enough to just replace the function names in
> your code when you want to get the display name instead of the login name.
>
> I already made the necessary changes to ownCloud core which are also
> part of the merge request. Feel free to double check you Core-App to
> make sure that I didn't miss something.
>
> [1] https://github.com/owncloud/core/pull/1360
>
> cheers,
> Björn
>