Needs to support direct searching of contacts

[Michał Sawicz]

Use case:
- contact auto-completion

When typing addressees in an email app, you want to be able to use auto-completion from your contacts without disclosing more data than necessary.

The only secure way seems to be for the content hub to own the display of matching results, otherwise we're opening ourselves to a brute-force attack to get data on all the contacts.

So my proposal would be that, as usual, a content hub operation is started for the search (decorated with originator geometry most likely), the hub queries all relevant data sources and displays a list of matching results. The search query will need to be updated as the user types. Selecting one of those would trigger the actual content exchange.

This type of prompt could not gain focus (as to allow the user to continue typing in the text entry), and would probably need to support some styling properties to make it fit within the originator app.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Added dekko as the project to immediately benefit from this.

[Dan Chapman  (dpniel)]

I would love to see a feature like this added to content-hub,

At the moment the only solution we have in dekko is to mass import contacts which we then have to maintain a duplicate address-book with no real way to keep it in sync, other than do another mass import and filter out dups. Which is a pain and bad UX in my opinion.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Pat McGowan (pat-mcgowan)]

good one for the backlog

[Alan Pope 🍺🐧🐱 🦄 (popey)]

@bfiller Is there a timescale when we can get the work on this started? It's a blocker for getting dekko in the image.

[Dan Chapman  (dpniel)]

Dropping the priority for this on Dekko as we currently have contact import setup through content-hub. This bug fixed would still be a more ideal solution, but it's no longer a blocker in Dekko.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

if dekko is going to be the default email client on the app, I would vote for whitelisting it to allow direct access to the contact list from the address-book-service (same as dialer, messaging and calendar). This way, a content-hub import and separate copy would not be needed. Otherwise it will be hard to achieve the desired user experience with searching for contacts as we have no plans to do that in content-hub.