Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Mon Sep 26 2011 Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
Why not have separate minibuffer prompts for surname and given name?
Many of my records are for Chinese people. Right now I can't be bothered
separating out the characters for surname and given name, and usually
they all get lumped into whatever default bbdb picks for names with no
spaces. Separate prompts for surname and given name would solve this
(and the surname prompt could say or organization name, something
like that).
Or, if a syntax for splitting is introduced, perhaps it could indicate
which side is the surname and which the given name, to make it easier to
create records for cultures where surname comes first. I'm not bothered
that the resulting name is displayed backwards (given name first), but
it would be great if entry were made easier.
My random suggestion: use { or } for the separator. The surname is
the part that's inside the bracket. So:
Eric{Abrahamsen
}
{Lucky Star Buffet Restaurant
Bartók}Béla
On second thought, if you did it this way, BBDB could learn from the
parsing the proper display order of the name, and store that as a
boolean with the name itself. Parsing would be a little more
complicated, but this would provide for much more flexible
customization.
Nice thoughts, thank you!
Being a lazy person when it comes to typing, I'd prefer for myself
to have one prompt for the full name. But this could be made
customizable, such that one can also get two prompts for first and
last name. And if the customizable default for entering names was
full-name, the bracket separator could be used for more
flexibility.
Controlling the display order via the bracket scheme is also a neat
idea. The flag could also be used if first and last name are entered
separately. What would be a convenient way to control the value of
this flag when entering the name in the latter way?
Roland
--
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threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
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Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
Direct editing maybe similar to wdired-mode could be, indeed, a great thing. -- Yet as I said: I'll postpone such dreams till BBDB 3 has been released. No! I want it now! [...starts rolling on the floor screaming...] Now! now! now! now! now!! Stefan Damn adults! -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Mon Sep 26 2011 Stefan Monnier wrote: Direct editing maybe similar to wdired-mode could be, indeed, a great thing. -- Yet as I said: I'll postpone such dreams till BBDB 3 has been released. No! I want it now! [...starts rolling on the floor screaming...] Now! now! now! now! now!! Stefan Damn adults! You want it now? Who cares about now?? -- Get it yesterday! Now that it's been scientifically proven that the speed of light is no boundary anymore, I could finally complete the missing piece in the Emacs package elisp-dream.el. This will read your mind and translate (with twice the speed of light) your deepest dreams directly into elisp code. Actually, the code goes into yesterday's backup of your hard drive. To install elisp-dream.el, just dream about it and it will install itself automatically. Note that the compiled version elisp-dream.elc gives you some remarkable speed-ups. It even reads your mind when your brain is off-line. Roland PS: Wait! You say you have dreams that cannot be coded in elisp?? -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
Roland Winkler wink...@gnu.org writes: PS: Wait! You say you have dreams that cannot be coded in elisp?? I hear some folks get divide-by-zero errors. -- http://www.wistly.net -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On 2011-09-24 03:27 +0800, Roland Winkler wrote: When I looked at this once more I thought that this could be something more people might like to use so that it could become part of the BBDB trunk. Namely: There could be an optional note field `name-face' similar to `creation-date' and `timestamp'. This note field could either directly hold the name of a face that font-lock will use for highlighting the name of a record. Or the value of name-face could be a key which gets translated to a face via something like `bbdb-name-face-alist'. (Even both of these schemes could exist in parallel.) I am fine with anything that allows one to enter organisation-only records nicely. For example, dividing Lucky Star Buffet Restaurant into firstname and lastname is not nice. We should get rid of that. Leo -- All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy2 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Sun Sep 25 2011 Leo wrote: I am fine with anything that allows one to enter organisation-only records nicely. For example, dividing Lucky Star Buffet Restaurant into firstname and lastname is not nice. We should get rid of that. Any suggestions what to do? It seems that again this is a somewhat separate problem. I mean, by default BBDB uses bbdb-divide-name to divide a name into first and last name. If a record already exists, you can call bbdb-record-edit-name with a prefix arg. This way you can edit the first and last name separately so that you get for sure what you want. But this requires that the record already exists. There should also be a mechanism to do such a thing in the first place when the record is created. (There will always be unusual names where bbdb-divide-name is bound to fail.) If a record is created by hand using bbdb-create, this command is too complex for a prefix arg. (It's been using a prefix arg, but in general it's rather confusing which part of the record creation should be modified because of the prefix arg.) A simple solution would be that if the user enters a name string that contains a special character such as % as separator, then this defines the first and last name. So then you would have to enter the name as %Lucky Star Buffet Restaurant. Would this be useful? A much fancier solution would be to reimplement bbdb-create from scratch by using something like a form to fill, similar to what customize is using. This could be done in a much more transparent way than the current minibuffer-based approach. Yet I do not know yet how to deal with things like the street part of an address. The customize approach of adding lines appears a bit clumsy to me if one wanted to enter more records; but maybe this would be just a matter of getting used to such a scheme. A similar approach could also be used for editing records in a more transparent way... Roland -- All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy2 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Mon, Sep 26 2011, Roland Winkler wrote:
On Sun Sep 25 2011 Roland Winkler wrote:
A much fancier solution would be to reimplement bbdb-create from
scratch by using something like a form to fill, similar to what
customize is using.
I should add: Such a rather substantial change would have rather low
priority on my current BBDB agenda. Currently, I consider a proper
BBDB release more important.
A simple solution would be that if the user enters a name string
that contains a special character such as % as separator, then
this defines the first and last name. So then you would have to
enter the name as %Lucky Star Buffet Restaurant. Would this be
useful?
Such a scheme, while not perfect, could provide a reasonable
solution till someone finds the time to implement a fancier scheme.
(This scheme would only require a few lines of new code.)
Yet in any case: suggestions for better schemes are always welcome.
Why not have separate minibuffer prompts for surname and given name?
Many of my records are for Chinese people. Right now I can't be bothered
separating out the characters for surname and given name, and usually
they all get lumped into whatever default bbdb picks for names with no
spaces. Separate prompts for surname and given name would solve this
(and the surname prompt could say …or organization name, something
like that).
Or, if a syntax for splitting is introduced, perhaps it could indicate
which side is the surname and which the given name, to make it easier to
create records for cultures where surname comes first. I'm not bothered
that the resulting name is displayed backwards (given name first), but
it would be great if entry were made easier.
My random suggestion: use { or } for the separator. The surname is
the part that's inside the bracket. So:
Eric{Abrahamsen
王}小波
{Lucky Star Buffet Restaurant
Bartók}Béla
On second thought, if you did it this way, BBDB could learn from the
parsing the proper display order of the name, and store that as a
boolean with the name itself. Parsing would be a little more
complicated, but this would provide for much more flexible
customization.
Two cents,
Eric
--
All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a
definitive record of customers, application performance, security
threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes
sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1
___
bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net
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BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
A much fancier solution would be to reimplement bbdb-create from scratch by using something like a form to fill, similar to what customize is using. I should add: Such a rather substantial change would have rather low priority on my current BBDB agenda. Currently, I consider a proper BBDB release more important. Being able to (more or less) directly edit the *BBDB* buffer would be great. Stefan -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Thu Sep 22 2011 Roland Winkler wrote: It seems to me that something like a note field for the predicate `person-p' with values natural, artifical, restaurant, bookstore etc was more to the point here. Then the only thing you need to customize is the function bbdb-display-name-organization. When I looked at this once more I thought that this could be something more people might like to use so that it could become part of the BBDB trunk. Namely: There could be an optional note field `name-face' similar to `creation-date' and `timestamp'. This note field could either directly hold the name of a face that font-lock will use for highlighting the name of a record. Or the value of name-face could be a key which gets translated to a face via something like `bbdb-name-face-alist'. (Even both of these schemes could exist in parallel.) Thoughts? Roland -- All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy2 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On 2011-09-21 23:11 +0800, Roland Winkler wrote: (bbdb-defstruct record firstname lastname affix aka organization organization-p phone address mail notes cache) What do you think? Maybe, I am just missing a typical application for myself. How could such an extra predicate be used? Where will it make a difference? It makes a different in displaying records. See: http://i.imgur.com/0NJt1.png Another example is one can list all organization-only records easily. BTW, I have (setq bbdb-mail-alias-field 'tags) for grouping records. Maybe I am an old-fashioned person. I have quite a few records without an email address. Anyway I consider the organization field a rather different thing. It can take multiple words per element, whereas an alias is an abbreviation for something else. Note that the added capability to make organisation-only records does not stop people from using BBDB in the way you describe. Leo -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Thu Sep 22 2011 Leo wrote: It makes a different in displaying records. See: http://i.imgur.com/0NJt1.png Another example is one can list all organization-only records easily. It seems to me that something like a note field for the predicate `person-p' with values natural, artifical, restaurant, bookstore etc was more to the point here. Then the only thing you need to customize is the function bbdb-display-name-organization. Note that the added capability to make organisation-only records does not stop people from using BBDB in the way you describe. I found that part of the problem of the old BBDB code was that it had gained a significant part of its complexity when it implemented solutions in a way that appeared to me not quite to the point. Your patch includes modficiations in various places. And I am quite sure that you'll find more places that need to be patched as time goes by. Whenever it's possible, I'd be glad if such extra complexity can be avoided. Otherwise, in the long run maintenance of BBDB becomes much more difficult. Roland -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Wed Sep 21 2011 Leo wrote: Maybe a cleaner way is to insert a new slot `organisation-p' in the definition: (bbdb-defstruct record firstname lastname affix aka organization organization-p phone address mail notes cache) What do you think? Maybe, I am just missing a typical application for myself. How could such an extra predicate be used? Where will it make a difference? BTW, I have (setq bbdb-mail-alias-field 'tags) for grouping records. Maybe I am an old-fashioned person. I have quite a few records without an email address. Anyway I consider the organization field a rather different thing. It can take multiple words per element, whereas an alias is an abbreviation for something else. Roland -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
Re: [PATCH] Better support for organisation-only records
On Tue Sep 20 2011 Leo wrote: Better support for organisation-only records. Also fix a bug when firstname or lastname are nil. Comments welcome ;) For those who did not browse Leo's code: The current BBDB code assumes that a record should have a name so that the record can be identified by this name. Leo's code adds the organization field as an alternative if a record has no name associated with it. I guess this is really raising two questions: - At least which fields should a record have filled to be a valid record? - What are possible usages of the organization field? While I can not yet claim I thought about this in all detail, in my own usage of BBDB I have looked at the organization field as a list of attributes for grouping records (by means of BBDB's search functions). This motivated the change to make the organization field a list (while in BBDB 2 it was a string): So one person might be a colleague from work, but also a member of this or that other organization. Then BBDB can make a list of all colleagues from work or some other organization. So if I make a BBDB record for something that's not a person, I put the name of this 'something' into the name field - so that the organization field is still available as a list of grouping attributes in much the same way it works for real persons. An organization with a BBDB record can likewise be part of a larger network. Roland -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 ___ bbdb-info@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bbdb-info BBDB Home Page: http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/
