Permit a better extend of VCardProperty

[prrvchr]

Hi all,

I use ez-vcard in my LibreOffice extension vCardOOo.

For the purposes of this extension, I have extended all the properties supported by vCardOOo to include methods specific to the underlying database.

However, I am missing three methods from the VCardProperty class in order to process all the properties in a generic way. These three methods would be:

    public String[] getPropertyCategories() {
        return new String[0];
    }

    public String[] getPropertyTypes() {
        return new String[0];
    }

    public Map<String, String> getPropertiesValue() {
        return Collections.emptyMap();
    }

The first method allows me to retrieve all categories for the property: ezvcard.property.Categories

The second method allows me to retrieve all types for properties: ezvcard.property.Address, ezvcard.property.Email and ezvcard.property.Telephone

The last method allows me to retrieve a map (i.e. key -> value) that can be customized for the properties: ezvcard.property.Address, ezvcard.property.Email, ezvcard.property.FormattedName, ezvcard.property.Organization, ezvcard.property.StructuredName, ezvcard.property.Telephone, ezvcard.property.Title and ezvcard.property.Uid. The unique key in this map will be the name of the column in the database.

Wouldn't it be possible to integrate the three methods into the VCardProperties class, specifying that they are there to be overridden?

Thanks.

[prrvchr]

To move forward on this issue for now, I have created forks on ez-vcard and vinnie to integrate this patch and compile archives as modules. This also allows me to more easily create my vCardOOo extension under Apache Ant.

[mangstadt]

I'm confused about why you want to add the getPropertyCategories method to the VCardProperty class. CATEGORY is itself a vCard property. It is not a field that all vCard properties can have, like groups or parameters.

For getPropertyTypes(), you can do this without needing a new method: VCardProperty.getParameters().getTypes()

For getPropertiesValue(), I feel it's too specific to your use case, so I wouldn't want to add it to ez-vcard.