DAViCal CalDAV & CardDAV Server

On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 09:41 -0600, Scott Barker wrote:
> Does davical support fine-grained CardDAV permissions? I have set up a
> shared addressbook for staff at my workplace, and I'd like to allow them to
> add and modify contacts, but not delete them. I'm not sure how it happens,
> but periodically a large portion of the contacts are deleted. I suspect it
> has something to do with users "cleaning up" or "merging" their contacts,
> but the easiest way to prevent it is to disallow deletion of contacts. Is
> this possible? Thanks.

Hi Scott,

It is not possible to restrict permissions for a user accessing their
own addressbook (or calendar), but you can certainly disallow deletes
from a shared addressbook.

The permission is labeled "Delete Events/Collections" in DAViCal which
is kind of calendar-orientated - it should probably just be labeled
"Delete".

Regards,
					Andrew.
-- 
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andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com                            +64(272)DEBIAN
          Even moderation ought not to be practiced to excess.
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On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 09:36:25PM +1200, Andrew McMillan wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 09:41 -0600, Scott Barker wrote:
> > Does davical support fine-grained CardDAV permissions? I have set up a
> > shared addressbook for staff at my workplace, and I'd like to allow them to
> > add and modify contacts, but not delete them. I'm not sure how it happens,
> > but periodically a large portion of the contacts are deleted. I suspect it
> > has something to do with users "cleaning up" or "merging" their contacts,
> > but the easiest way to prevent it is to disallow deletion of contacts. Is
> > this possible? Thanks.
> 
> Hi Scott,
> 
> It is not possible to restrict permissions for a user accessing their
> own addressbook (or calendar), but you can certainly disallow deletes
> from a shared addressbook.
> 
> The permission is labeled "Delete Events/Collections" in DAViCal which
> is kind of calendar-orientated - it should probably just be labeled
> "Delete".

Thanks, Andrew, that did the trick.

One odd behaviour I noticed is that even though the contact isn't deleted
from the shared address book in davical, it remains invisible on the user's
iPhone after they try to delete it. Making any change to the contact from
another device seems to make the contact re-appear on the user's iPhone. In
testing, I added a phone number to the "deleted" contact from another
device, then removed that phone number, so the only change server-side was
to the REV: attribute of the contact. That appears to be sufficient for the
user's iPhone to pull the contact back down again.

-- 
Scott Barker
Linux Consultant
scott@...
http://www.mostlylinux.ca

On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 09:47 -0600, Scott Barker wrote:
> On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 09:36:25PM +1200, Andrew McMillan wrote:
> > On Wed, 2012-05-23 at 09:41 -0600, Scott Barker wrote:
> > > Does davical support fine-grained CardDAV permissions? I have set up a
> > > shared addressbook for staff at my workplace, and I'd like to allow them to
> > > add and modify contacts, but not delete them. I'm not sure how it happens,
> > > but periodically a large portion of the contacts are deleted. I suspect it
> > > has something to do with users "cleaning up" or "merging" their contacts,
> > > but the easiest way to prevent it is to disallow deletion of contacts. Is
> > > this possible? Thanks.
> > 
> > Hi Scott,
> > 
> > It is not possible to restrict permissions for a user accessing their
> > own addressbook (or calendar), but you can certainly disallow deletes
> > from a shared addressbook.
> > 
> > The permission is labeled "Delete Events/Collections" in DAViCal which
> > is kind of calendar-orientated - it should probably just be labeled
> > "Delete".
> 
> Thanks, Andrew, that did the trick.
> 
> One odd behaviour I noticed is that even though the contact isn't deleted
> from the shared address book in davical, it remains invisible on the user's
> iPhone after they try to delete it. Making any change to the contact from
> another device seems to make the contact re-appear on the user's iPhone. In
> testing, I added a phone number to the "deleted" contact from another
> device, then removed that phone number, so the only change server-side was
> to the REV: attribute of the contact. That appears to be sufficient for the
> user's iPhone to pull the contact back down again.

I think that's probably a bug in iOS - it's likely to be a little-tested
functionality for them to have read-only access then try+fail to delete
a contact.

Once a user elsewhere makes a change the device will get notified of a
change on the next sync and will figure things out from there - sounds
like that part works anyway :-)

Cheers,
					Andrew.

-- 
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andrew (AT) morphoss (DOT) com                            +64(272)DEBIAN
     CHUBBY CHECKER just had a CHICKEN SANDWICH in downtown DULUTH!
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