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Resource Autocompletion in Roundcube
In a previous article, I described my experiences setting up Kolab for groupware functionality on Debian Wheezy. One of the problems I encountered was that of searching for resources when creating events, and it didn’t seem possible to start typing the name of a resource and to have the details autocompleted. Given that Kolab integrates Roundcube webmail with other services including LDAP directories, and given that Roundcube seemed happy to look up people in such directories, I suspected that fixing this problem would probably involve refining the search criteria for each search performed when a key is pressed in the participant field of the event dialogue (or in the recipient field of the compose mail screen).
After some digging in the source code for the purpose of getting some familiarity with what goes on inside Roundcube, I found a guide to LDAP address books in Roundcube that mentions some of the queries one might expect to happen when autocompletion is taking place. And, sure enough, such information can be found in the /etc/roundcubemail/main.inc.php file provided by the Kolab-related Debian packages. So it then becomes a matter of specifying some other queries to permit resources to be found as well as people.
My solution to the problem, which may not be the most appropriate (so I welcome corrections and comments), is to add another address book provider as follows:
$rcmail_config['ldap_public'] = array(
...
'kolab_resources' => array(
'name' => 'Global Resources',
...
'base_dn' => 'ou=Resources,dc=example,dc=com',
...
'LDAP_Object_Classes' => array("top", "mailrecipient"),
'required_fields' => array("cn", "mail"),
...
'search_fields' => array('cn', 'mail'),
'sort' => array('cn', 'mail'),
...
'filter' => '(objectClass=mailrecipient)',
...
'fieldmap' => Array(
// Roundcube => LDAP
'name' => 'cn',
'email:primary' => 'mail',
'email:alias' => 'alias',
),
),
...
);
$rcmail_config['autocomplete_addressbooks'] = Array(
'kolab_addressbook',
'kolab_resources',
);
Here, the new entry for kolab_resources augments the existing kolab_addressbook entry (not shown), and it changes the nature of the search by modifying the base_dn to refer to the “Resources” organisational unit, where Kolab puts all the resources in the LDAP store. Since resources do not seem to provide various fields that people provide, some changes are also required to indicate which fields are provided, and in the fieldmap section the name expected by Roundcube is mapped to the cn provided by the LDAP store, thus enabling the name of each resource to appear alongside the mail address by which the resource is known.
With the new entry added, the autocomplete_addressbooks setting needs to be updated to include this new source of data in any future searching operations. And with that, it should be possible to specify a resource and have it autocompleted in Roundcube:
Resource autocompletion in Roundcube