[Opensync-devel] How to add alternative names (furigana) to a person

[HIRANO T. <hir...@zn...>]

Hello,

I have a question on how to add alternative names to a person in OpenSync.

We would often like to add alternative names to a person.
For example, a Chinese person has their name in Chinese characters,
but non-Chinese speakers may want to have his/her name in Latin
characters in addition to that.

However, this XML schema:
http://svn.opensync.org/format-plugins/xmlformat/trunk/schemas/xmlformat-contact.xsd
says that the Name element can occur only once in a Contact element.
Because of this, we cannot have multiple names for a person.

This is especially important in Japan.
Japanese people always use two formats for their names: kanji and
furigana (or yomigana).
So I need to investigate how to store them.

I think there are several ways to do this:
1) Allow multiple Name elements in a Contact element in the XML schema
2) Introduce AlternativeName (generic) or Furigana (specific to Japan)
element to the XML schema
3) Store alternative name in FormattedName using parentheses, like
"Latin Characters (Chinese Characters)" or "Furigana (Kanji)"

3) does not require any change for OpenSync.
But it is non-standard and it will cause compatibility problem between plugins.

Regards,
HIRANO Takahito