Contacts

Contacts are at the heart of instant messaging, and thus the Chat Core has a way to abstract to a "person" (represented by an imIContact instance), which might connect to multiple networks, etc.

Draft: This page is not complete.

Display Name

The display name used in the buddy list window or in conversations can come from several sources, by precedence order:

• User-set alias, stored locally (set when the user renames someone from Thunderbird)

• Server-stored alias (some protocol store the aliases online)

• Display name / Friendly name (set by the remote contact, stored on the server)

• Username, the unique identifier of the buddy for this protocol. Can be numbers (e.g. ICQ, QQ), email addresses (e.g. MSN, XMPP) or some other string.

Possible storage locations:

• mozStorage (the file blist.sqlite)

• chat core (cached copy)

• server read/write (server-stored alias)

• server read only (display names)