[Kolab-devel] Kolab Support for the Toltec Connector

[Bo Thorsen]

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On Thursday 30 October 2003 08:24, Joon Radley wrote:
> > > 2) What is the
> > > format of the hidden synchronization message in the folders?

There are no hidden sync messages in the folders.

> > This message is sofar not finally defined. I will make a proposal
> > later. Basically the KDE Kolab Client currently does not support
> > multiple folders of the same type e.g. multiple calendars.

That's not true.

Open the preferences of a folder, and choose the contents to be mail, 
calendar, tasks, or notes.

> > Please let me know when you need to finally know this format.
>
> As soon as it is ready.

... but I agree it would be nice to have such a message, so we never have 
the problem of seeing the long list of iCals in the mails.

> > > 3) What is the
> > > format of the "groupware" messages?
> >
> > What do you mean?
>
> IMAP stores the messages in RFC822 format. Now if you have a mail with
> multiple MIME parts of text/plain and text/x-vcard, is this a groupware
> contact message or a normal email message where the sender has attached
> his VCARD.
>
> Now from what I can see from your document and the answer of question 1
> you infer the type of the message based on the mailbox that it is
> stored in. This can be a bit ambiguous.
>
> Maybe this can be resolved by the following:
>
> 1) The following additional headers in the RFC822 message:
>    X-KOLAB-TYPE: Appointment/Contact/Note/Journal/Task
>    X-KOLAB-TYPE-VERSION: 1
>
>   With this the RFC822 message defines the content of the groupware
> object. The version for each type will help later, when changes to the
> formats take place.

Can you make Outlook do that easily? I doubt it. And the fact that it can 
be done is not enough - think of a corporation with 10000 users that all 
have to set these options (if it can be done). Support hell.

No special headers.

> 2) The message is made up of two MIME parts:
>   text/plain: A text summary of the groupware object.
>   text/*: The actual object like text/calendar or text/v-card
>
> What do you think?
>
> Also in the document NOTES and TASKS have the MIME type text/plain,
> maybe it can be changed to text/x-note and text/x-task. Journals are
> undefined in the document. (RFC2445 VJOURNAL)

We (and Outlook) do it by looking at the content type. This is what one of 
my iCals in my Calendar look like:

Content-Type: text/calendar;
  method=REQUEST;
  charset="utf-8"
From: Bo Thorsen <bo at sonofthor.dk>
To: Bo Thorsen <bo at sonofthor.dk>
Subject: KOrganizer-1755686945.311
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2003 09:13:27 +0200
User-Agent: KMail/kroupware-1.0.1
Status: RO

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
...

I have cut out some uninteresting headers. As you can see, the only thing 
that identifies this, is the Content-Type header. This is what Outlook 
and KMail agrees upon.

KMail and Outlook will look at the contents of a mail like that, and find 
the iCal in there. If it's in the text, it uses that. If it's in a mime 
attachment and has type text/calendar, it finds that.

> > > 4) The directory structure used by the other Kolab clients?
> >
> > What do you mean?
>
> How does Kolab clients manage subdirectories on the server side?

We specify in the client, which folder should be the parent of the 
groupware folders. In that parent, we place folders named "Calendar", 
"Contacts", "Notes", and "Tasks". If the users want to, they can get the 
localized names Outlook uses, but I really hate that, because the MS 
morons translated the folder names on disk instead of just in the GUI.

Bo.
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