Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] Addbook vs addressbook

[Brian Johnson]

Jamie Lawrence (address@hidden) wrote:
>
>You actually need an arbitrary number of inetOrgPersons to model
>possible relations. What if I have a home, an office in city A, an
>office in city B, a role on the board of some other company, and a
>role in, say, several community organizations and open source projects?
>

I've been thinking about this ... I was originally thinking we should get rid 
of the
relationships table and put an org. link in the persons tables (which would
effectively limit the relationships between person and orgs to a n:1 
relationship),
but if we're adopting a new system, we should avoid having these limitations 
builtin

I was originally thinking we should get rid of the relationships table because 
the
addbook ui does not allow this n:n linking of both people to orgs and orgs to 
people
and I thought the ui would be hard to create to make this multi-people, 
multi-org
relationship easy to enter, edit, and understand.


I think I've come up with a ui that is both simple to use and understand and 
even
requires the the least amount of mouse clicks and page reloads.

On the person add or edit screen, start with the info linked directly to the 
person
(home address, personal phone, fax, notes, etc) and then have a line with with a
drop bown box to select multiple organizations to link this person to with any
already linked pre-selected (since this box might have thousands of 
organizitions
listed - ours would - I wondered if it should be a button to pop-up a window to 
add
new org links AND a select box showing orgs already linked - unselecting here 
would
remove the link).

Then, have a (possibly second) select box with the orgs already linked sorted
alphabetically with the first one pre-selected and below that show the org info
(make it editable) of the org .  This select box would control what org's info 
is
being shown (and is editable).

The org's add or edit screen could then use the same system but have the org's 
info
at the top and the linked person's info below the selection boxes.

This system would show (and make editable) all the info related to the person 
and
the first org (alphabetically) that it is linked to.  This is better than a url 
link
to the linked org since it saves the click and page reload and I think this 
proposed
bigger screen could be transferred faster than the two separate ones.  Also, it
provides more info for each person on one screen to make contact info lookups 
easier
and faster

I think most persons would be linked to only one org and therefore all info 
would
shown by default.  Even if two orgs are linked, you have a 50% chance of 
showing the
right one by default (but the user could still select the other one to add).  
Three
orgs - correct 33% of the time

The same would be true for the org's add and edit screens.


So Ralf, please edit the text you got from me regarding the db layout to remove 
the
suggestion to delete the relationships table and include this in the ui 
suggestions.

I hoped I explained this adequately.


What can I do to help?

--
Brian Johnson

This is where my witty signature line would be if I bothered to edit this line 
:)