Use a WebForm for Registration

I am in the process of thinking about using a WebForm form in place of the TWikiRegistration system for capturing user information and for providing a sensible (integrity preserving) mechanism to allow users to modify them at a later date.

This would not replace a user's ability to alter the free text part of the page but would segregate the free text part from the structured data oart and mean that we could leverage the form search mechanism to provide aggregate views such as 'Sort all users by first name giving icq details, mobile number and country of origin'

My thinking process led me to think that I would like to then be able to pull that data straight into my Handheld PC, or to email it as an appropriate type so that the recipient's email program could import it without requiring data re-entry.

... Allows use of VCARD

This led me to thinking about the VCARD standard, a widely used format designed to promote interoperability.

Questions:

1. Has anybody used a WebForm to capture structured user information in this way? Can you please share any learnings and/or code?
2. Has anybody got experience of working with the CPAN:Net::vCard or (the replacement) CPAN:Text::vCard packages? Do you know whether these could be made workable today?
3. Anyone else think this would be a good idea? Or bad idea? (say nothing if you are indifferent!)

-- MartinCleaver - 07 Jun 2003

Well, I would sure like to see some way to store VCard's in a structured format in a TWiki (also for syncing with a Palm)... I am beginning to move my "world" of various files, etc. over to a personal TWiki, and I would love to be able to put addresses, etc. in as a seperate "topic" or whatever for contacts... then they would be versioned, etc. also.

-- BruceDillahunty - 08 Jun 2003

Good idea! It would be nice if you could attach a portrait photo in the form as well. So you could create a mug shot page. Handy for intranets.

Funny you should say that because when I created a topic showing photos of all our users I named it MugShots, which does little to disprove that I am an evil admin. -- SamHasler - 17 Jun 2003

Actually, I think VCard provides for a photo, audio, etc. attachment... so I think that would be covered, although we might have to special handle display of the info.

-- BruceDillahunty - 10 Jun 2003

New thought, if anybody is keeping up with this...

Is there some way of just putting the VCard in as the document... its text based as I recall... then the "form" would just be a flag to have it parsed and displayed differently, as a user option. Regular search modes would work easily then, wouldn't they?

-- BruceDillahunty - 16 Jun 2003

yes please and also iCalendar todo lists and appointments.... mmmm (i really do want these, but errrr feature creep?).

actually, having a twiki available as a set of IMAP public folders might be interesting

-- SvenDowideit - 16 Jun 2003

Well, I'm still thinking on this... I would think a "plugin" could be done fairly easily (yeah, right... really a place for me to talk :-)) that could parse either an attachment or an inline VCare/iCal/etc. file and display it as an option... then it wouldn't be too much creep (people wouldn't have to use/have it if they didn't want to). If they did want to, just load the "interpreter" and have a new template for displaying those types of files if the metadata says to do so.

-- BruceDillahunty - 17 Jun 2003

Thinking out loud... could I implement a "%VCARD{ATTACHMENT|Topic}% type instruction as a pluging that would nicely format the VCard and display it in the topic or whatever that you were doing? Seems reasonable to me, but I'm kind of new to this...

-- BruceDillahunty - 17 Jun 2003

Doing this now

... Using an existing recent patch and a Skin

If you capture user details into a TWiki webform, then you use the one line patch I posted the other day would probably allow you to do this right now with no extra code in TWiki - just using a skin - ala the RDF/RSS functionality. (VCARD's are just a text format yes?) If you want to make attachments inline, then yes, some work would need doing, but I would suggest a generic plugin to do that task rather than VCARD specific.

Sample (partial) template:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:%META{formfield(surname)}%;%META{formfield(forename)}%;%META{formfield(initials)}%
FN:%META{formfield(fullname)}%
ADR;HOME:;;P=E4iv=E4ns=E4teenkuja 4 as. 1;Espoo;;02210;Finland
URL:.%META{formfield(url)}%
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:%META{formfield(EMAIL)}%
END:VCARD

Someone interested in this would need to check the VCard specs.

... or Inlining & formatting attached VCards.

If you just want to attach VCards, then do this:

 

%INCLUDE{"https://www.twiki.org/p/pub/Codev/UserDetailsInVCARD/User.vcard")%

In the user web, you could have this simply as part of the skin. If that's the sort of thing you'd like.

-- TWikiGuest - 18 Jun 2003