Thunderbird Contacts: Adding/managing personalized views to an adress book (similar to categories)

[Herzi-Linners]

I have a personal email account for business issues. With this email account I use the address book (CalDAV) storing the business contacts of companies, doctors, insurance contacts, authorities and so on.

With the vCard specification there are ten fields for user-defined purposes. Similar to categories I use two of these user-defined fields called "branch" (sector) and "subbranch" (subsector).

few examples:
1) branch: healthiness - subbranch: family doctor or oculist or pharmacy (and so on)
2) branch: insurances
3) branch: associations - subbranch: Trade association or Voluntary association or Non profit association (and so on)
4) branch: financial sector - subbranch: bank or credit institution

With personalized views it's possible to filter and sort contacts. Here a few examples of personalized views:

a) personalized view "Healthiness": This view shows only the contacts from branch/category "healthiness" and sort them via name or subbranch and name.

b) personalized view "Insurances": This view shows only the contacts from branch/category "insurances" and sort them via name or subbranch and name.

c) personalized view "Emergency": This view shows only contacts for emergency purposes.  This could be police, emergency, lost of credit cards, contacts of 'special' persons or special contacts from insurances in case of emergency...

Using personalized views helps to filter, sort and group contacts and have them with one click on view instead of scrolling and searching in large lists.

[Jon]

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[Herzi-Linners]

Some change to my idea:

In the first version of my idea, I used "user defined fields" in the address book. But this isn't a good idea. User defined fields won't by synchronized by the standard synchronisation mechanism due to the  vCard & CalDAV specifications. They aren't part of the specification.

In my description I change the suggestion to use the field "category", which is part of the vCard specification (rfc6350).

The basic idea of personalized views keeps on.
These are basic concepts dealing with data (e.g. in databases: sorting, filtering, grouping datas).