Re: [VCARDDAV] draft-daboo-carddav-directory-gateway and large/multiple directories

[Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]>]

Hi Arnaud,

--On March 11, 2010 3:37:19 PM +0100 Arnaud Quillaud 
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> As currently defined, the directory-gateway property
> (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-daboo-carddav-directory-gateway-01#sect
> ion-3) points to a single carddav collection which may aggregate results
> from different sources.
> I see two problems with that approach:
> - In organizations with a very large number of directory entries, it
> would be much beneficial to be able to offer a choice of multiple
> collections ("all users in my Business Unit",  "all conference rooms",
> etc...).
> - It might always be obvious to aggregate data from various sources,
> especially if future extensions allow for paging or sorting of results.
>
> Hence couldn't we allow the directory-gateway property to point to a
> regular collection containing address book collections ? We could mandate
> that address book queries be supported at the root collection level to
> still allow global searches.

Why not provide that "filtering" via the addressbook-query report? i.e. the 
LDAP OU attribute would map to a vcard property and then the client could 
"scope" its query by filtering on that property. Yes that does require the 
client to know what vCard property to "scope" and what values might be 
appropriate.

I am wary of going too far down the road of exposing the "internals" of the 
directory and its schema via CardDAV - as stated in the document this is 
not meant as a full replacement of the directory. I think if scoped queries 
like you propose are needed, then maybe the client should use the directory 
"protocol" directly. To that end it might help if the CardDAV directory 
gateway address book had a WebDAV property listing URIs for all the sources 
of the directory data. That way if a client decided it needed to have a 
more sophisticated interaction with the directory, then it could look at 
those URIs and figure out how to do that itself.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo