Subject: [VCARDDAV] vCard categories vs. WebDAV collections

From: Simon Perreault <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2007 09:45:28 -0800

Hi,

First of all, yesterday's dinner was great, thanks for organizing it.

So I've been thinking a bit more about the problem we mentioned yesterday of 
having two mechanisms for handling contact groups. Here's the use case: I 
want to classify my contacts into groups such 
as "Coworkers", "Friends", "Family", etc. It will be common that a contact be 
a member of multiple groups. In that case, I want the resource to be shared, 
not copied, so that when I edit let's say the phone number in one group, the 
change is reflected in the other groups.

There may be two ways of doing this with the current specification of CardDAV, 
which may create confusion between UAs. Following 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-webdav-bind-20.txt, the UA may 
create a collection for each group and BIND a contact resource into the 
collections associated to the groups it belongs to. Or it may modify the 
resource content and stick the groups into the vCard CATEGORIES 
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2426#section-3.6.1).

I think CardDAV should explicitly mention which is the "correct" one.

Did I make sense? Is this a non-issue?

P.S. This is my first post on an IETF mailing list. Yay! ;)

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From: Cyrus Daboo <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:58:06 -0800

Hi Simon,

> Did I make sense? Is this a non-issue?

There are use cases for both ways.

I think the key use case for separate collections is to make handling 
shared address books easier. It generally easy to manage ACLs on a single 
collection (which has inheritance over its child resources) than it is to 
manage at the per-resource level.

So I think the use of CATEGORIES for "tagging" vCards for searching 
purposes is fine. But if "tagging" a vCard as "work" actually means "make 
this vCard visible to my co-workers" then you have a problem. You've got to 
use CATEGORIES and set the ACL.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo