Links/reading

• Mark Nottingham's blog post about WebDAV and resource metadata

Importing rarely-used contacts fields

This documents a discussion Mitch & I had yesterday about importing contacts fields that are so rarely used (like assistant's phone #, billing #, department ID) that we don't want to include those as attributes in our shipping schema. What happens when an import code module finds values in those fields -- e.g. one particular user decided that "billing #" was actually quite useful? Our current plan is that the import module should generally create a new attribute only at the point that it finds it needs to preserve imported information. This is much like what happens when a user customizes the schema for their own use anyway, it's just done automatically by the import module. We will experiment more with this approach -- e.g. whether the import module should also expand the contact detail view or whether that detail view can handle these ad-hoc attributes anyway. Some of these answers we can't know until more UI design work has been done.

-- LisaDusseault - 28 Apr 2004