[Kolab-devel] RFC: replies to invitations sent to distribution lists

[Till Adam]

Kolabistas,

The problem manifesting itself as issue356 seems to be that in the case of one 
or more distribution lists and one or more additional persons as attendees of 
an invitation there is no way to figure out which of the attendees is the one 
representing "us", in other words, which is the one we are being invited 
with. That's important since that entry is the one we need to check for RSVP 
(whether we need to send a reply mail) and for the participant role we are 
invited in. For the case of the lone attendee being a distribution list we 
special case and use that, but as soon as there are other attendees as well, 
there is no way to find the right attendee short of an LDAP query, which is 
out of the question, I think. Since we ask the user for the identity to use 
when answering we can add a new attendee with the right name and email 
address, but for the RSVP and role we have to guess.

The attached patch does that guessing by iterating over the list of all 
attendees and if the RSVP and role fields of all of them are the same (which 
will be the case in the vast majority of cases, as far as we can predict) it 
uses those common settings. In case the attendees have conflicting RSVP 
settings we err on the side of safety and send an answer, although 
potentially the organizer did not ask for one. As for the role we default to 
being a required participant, which is probably the most common kind.

I'm fairly sure the Toltec connector has the same issue, and a quick test 
confirms that, so I propose to adopt the above described scheme for all Kolab 
clients. It should produce expected results in most cases and the 
ramifications in those cases were it does not are tolerable, as far as I can 
tell.

Thanks for listening,

Till
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: invitation-answers-to-distlists.diff
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 7585 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.kolab.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20050111/92da9097/attachment.bin>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.kolab.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20050111/92da9097/attachment.sig>