[Evolution] contact properties




I have just started to look at the contact manager (address book), and I have a
question/comment that bothers me seriously: Wouldn't it be better to
allow for dynamic user defined properties for the contacts, instead of offering
this large static set of predefined properties? At least for me it is really
not very interesting to have entries for "Manager's name",
"Assistant's name" etc for all contacts. I would rather have entries
like "Old classmate", "ex-wife", or whatever I prefer. What about a
possibility to define properties with certain data types
(date/number/currency/text/URL/MIME etc), and then to have the possibility to
use these properties for all contacts in the database? Maybe there
could be a way to define contact types that includes a certain set of
properties by default (with the possibility to add further properties
as needed). I understand that this dynamic property handling could
make the UI less esthetic, but the usability would IMHO be enormously
increased. I also guess that there are certain properties that are
used for interoperability with other functions in Evolution, ie mapped
to properties in these functions. It would be good if this mapping
was also user defined, so that the user can determine which property
field of a suitable data type should be used for a certain
action. E.g. which property of the type "e-mail address" should be
used when applying the action "new e-mail to contact". If anyone comes
up with the objection that this would be too complex for the "normal
user", I suggest that Evolution is shipped with a suitable default set
of dynamic contact types and properties.

Did anyone understand anything of this?

Sincerely,

Magnus





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