Help on "lookup" function - Seems seriously lacking

I just installed Openfire on a company server. It works really well, but I would like to see a more robust search function. In fact, it doesn’t seem to search intelligently at all.

For example, if I create an account for someone named John Smith, with a username of jsmith, there is no way to search for just “John”. When you click the “add user” button, you can type anything you want, it always goes to “pending”. You have no way to know if the add request you created is actually tied to another user!

Then, there is the “lookup profile” under “Contacts”. No matter what you search for, you always get the same error message: “not a valid Jabber ID”. At first, I thought this must be something I failed to set up correctly in the server settings, but I can’t find anything on it.

So if you are in a workplace where the administrator uses a first initial/last name format, you will not be able to search by first name. I should be able look up a person by first name, and get a list of people with that first name, and then select the one I want to add to my list. This should only happen if that user is a valid registered user on the server. Instead, there is no search feature to look up the profile, and no way to know if the person that you just added is actually a user or not.

Granted, I’m not a programmer by trade, but I am familiar with many programming languages and this doesn’t seem like something that would be very hard to do. In fact, it seems like a serious oversight. If I’m wrong and I’m missing something please tell me.

Hi,

the search function does use the data provided in the JIVEUSER table which you can edit as an admin using the web console. There you can define a first name, a last name and the email address which is used by the search function. I agree that this is bad and one should fix this. One could create a plugin which copies the vCard information into the JIVEUSER table every time the vCard is changed using a packet interceptor and one time for all vCards during the installation of the plugin.

If I remember right there is a search plugin which supports LDAP and allows to query LDAP and thus the fields used in a vCard.

If you want to add a user to your roster you must specify the JID like "jsmith@example.com" - then a subscription request is sent to the user which may accept or deny the subscription. As long as this is not clear the status is pending. There’s also the subscription plugin which allows to auto-accept all subscription requests, so there will be no pending status.

LG

Shhhhhhwwwwwwwwww… (the sound of your reply flying over my head)

Haha! I don’t do much programming, so this is a little beyond my abilities. Thanks for the reply though. I’ll look into it.

Hi Chris,

I wrote a small plugin to copy the vCard data into the JIVEUSER table. It seems to work but I would say it’s still in alpha state, you could anyhow try it on a test server and tell me if it helps you. The source code is included, with 200 lines it should be quite easy to review or modify it.

LG

You got PM!

vCard 2 OFUSER Plugin … I published it, so everyone can test it.