"Last action" fields

David Faure dfaure at klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se
Fri Oct 1 18:56:39 CEST 2004


On Friday 01 October 2004 17:40, David Faure wrote:
> On IRC today we discussed the fact that Outlook needs some "last action" fields, which we
> modelled as
> 
>         <last-action>(invitation-sent, update-sent, or not present)</last-action>
>         <last-action-date>(date or datetime, default not present)</start-date>
>         <last-action-recipients> { <smtp-address>(string)</smtp-address> } </last-action-recipients>
> 
> <sect2><title>Last Action</title></sect2>
> <para>The last action taken by the user on a given event can be "invitation-sent"
> (when the initial invitation was sent), or "update-sent" when an update was sent.
> The last-action-date tag stores the date and time when this last round of emails was
> sent, and the list of email addresses in last-action-recipients tells who received
> those mails. This makes it possible to notice, when adding a new attendee, that
> we only need to send mail to that attendee.</para>
> </sect2>
> 
> However this, alone, doesn't seem to me that it will be useful.
> If you
> A1) add a new attendee, and check the last-action-recipients list to see that
> everyone else got their invitation already, OK, you can mail that attendee alone.
> 
> But if you
> B1) change the location of the event, but don't send the mail yet
> B2) add a new attendee, the same code as in A1 is going to send a mail
> to the new attendee only. Is that OK? Shouldn't the user have a way to
> flush all pending changes, i.e. inform everyone about the new location?

Hmm. In fact that's independent from B1.

> It seems to me that optimizations like "only mailing the new attendee" can only be
> done if there is a way to compare the current revision number of the event
> with the revision number that it had when the last action was done. Then we can
> be sure no other change is pending.
Too difficult and not worth it, let's forget about that idea.


This came from trying to understand Joon's "number of updates" field,
but he made me realize it's nonsense.
That "number of updates" is the number of times mails were sent to
update the event, but neither he nor I can see what it's used for.
(It can't be for my idea above, if the value of that number when the last
mails were sent isn't stored).
If really necessary for outlook, I can add it to the kolab format (and to
Kontact's Event object) together with the last action stuff.


Same thing for  owner-appointment-id :
Joon said: "OL creates a random 32 bit integer when an invitation is sent out. 
As far as I know this is used as part of the iTIP transactions. I will be 
storing it in the object, but we may need it later when we handle replies from attendees."
I really wonder why that is different from the event UID...
The question is, obviously: do we need to generate such a number when
the first invitation is sent from kontact?
Does anyone know if (and where) this number is used in iTIP?

-- 
David Faure -- faure at kde.org, dfaure at klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se
Qt/KDE/KOffice developer
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Platform-independent software solutions




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