[horde] Searchable Identities

[Richard Wallace]

Hey guys,

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this.  I need to associate 
data with users.  The data will vary depending on the type of user (i.e. 
all users will have phone, email, address etc. but some will have 
additional fields depending on their industry).  I thought the best way 
to do this sort of thing would be using Horde identities.

A need along with this is for certain users to be able to update the 
identity information of other users to make sure their information is 
the most recent and accurate.  In one case this is going to be done for 
groups of users in the same industry with the same employer.  So, I need 
to be able to look up all identities that match those parameters.  I 
looked and saw that the current Identity object uses prefs for a backend 
and doesn't support searching.

Then I thought of maybe using turba for the Identity backend.  The 
problem with that is that turba is a bit of overkill for what we are 
looking to do now.  It also has the problem that it is a bit inflexible 
since it wouldn't allow us to store all user information in a single 
source without defining ALL the attributes ahead of time.

So, the next thing I looked at was implementing an Identity backend that 
uses the datatree for storage.

The other thing I thought about was maybe implementing my own simple 
contact manager, kind of a Turba's little brother application, and use 
that as an identity source.  That seems like a lot more work than I want 
to do to get all this working tho.

I'm curious what anyone thinks about this.  How would you all approach 
this problem?  Would there be interest in a datatree backend for Identities?

Rich