Support mentioning of contacts in comments

[thkoch2001]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I asked in Nextcloud for Google Docs-like features of mentioning users in comments: https://github.com/nextcloud/richdocuments/issues/1380

This feature request is for CollaboraOnline to provide the necessary APIs.

Describe the solution you'd like

When a certain symbol gets entered in a comment, e.g. "+" or "@", CollaboraOnline offers an autocomplete of usernames. CO needs to call into the hosting application to get the list of autocompletions.

Once the comment gets posted, CO instructs the hosting application to notify a set of users about the new comment.

[thkoch2001]

I believe issue #1673 is related to this one. I want automatic sharing of comments with mentioned users. #1673 is about getting a link that can be shared manually.

[nikslor]

I'd love to have this feature as well.

Nextcloud/ownCloud usually already provide the functionality to send mails (through PHP). Through the "richdocuments" integration CooL should be able to get the usernames and mail addresses of the users who have access on a document. So highlighting the users in a comment could trigger an API request from CooL to Nextcloud/ownCloud "sendMailNotification()".

I could actually help on the PHP side :)

[juliushaertl]

After discussing this with @kendy we'd need to have an implementation of this in core first to properly persist the mentions among with the user metadata within the document files

Requirements for a "Mention" element that users would add through the UI:

• Unique user identifier (could be any string, for Nextcloud it would be either the user id or federated cloud id)
• Display name (readable name of the user, as the user id might be a uuid or anything that would not be user friendly)
• E-Mail address (Optional, but could help for providing an option to interact with the user through Collabora Office on the desktop)
• Avatar (Similar to https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/4590 in order to be able to display the avatar of the mentioned user)

To give a more concrete example, integrating with a Nextcloud instance on cloud.example.com if a user would type @Julius the interface would fetch the user metadata from Nextcloud and persist that to the file:

• userId: julius@cloud.example.com
• displayName: Julius Haertl
• email: julius@example.com
• avatar: base64 encoded avatar

One additional thing to consider would be that depending on the integrator the userid might not work as a cross reference, between different integrators, for that it would be required to have some way to differentiate:

• namespace with a prefix nextcloud:julius@cloud.example.com
• use a url, so that the integrator can check if it is for example a nextcloud instance, this could use the Nextcloud profile page https://cloud.example.com/u/julius
• add an additional metadata for the integrator identifier

Open questions:

• Can this be supported on only specific types (like OpenDocument) or also others like OOXML?

Leaving this up to @kendy for further evaluation of the technical details on the core/cool side as discussed.

[rriemann]

Dears,

this is a super feature and Nextcloud implementation is on hold pending progress from CollaboraOnline!

[juliushaertl]

First parts were already done for in document mentions which is waiting for the next major Nextcloud release. Mentions in comments are still up for discussion though.

[rriemann]

Now we have Nextcloud 25.0.2. So you mean we need to wait for 26.0?

[juliushaertl]

Yes

[Hoeze]

NC26 was released in July, what is the state of this issue today?

[dorkmaneuver]

+1, I think this is a very useful collaborative feature and users often stress that this is better in Google docs... can we put this forward also with Collabora?

[botsarenthuman]

A user also asked about this today, specifically related to mail-merge and Nextcloud