Star preferred items

[spoorun]

Currently
There is no way of syncing or storing viewing or setting preferred items within a field type.
For example preferred email address, preferred phone etc...
vCard 4 has a mechanism for this (PREF property).

Rationale
Most other modern systems allow this.
This mechanism permits syncing, allows the user to intuitively email or dial the correct details and store that important information intuitively. It also ensures that the User sees the most important fields first (for example if there are a lot of phone numbers stored).

Resolution:

1. For each major item type a User should be able to set a 'preferred' item, by clicking a star symbol next to the item.

2. The items which are not preferred would have a hollow star, the ones which are would have a filled-in grey star.

3. Only one item of each type would be able to be preferred.

4. This would be stored and synced with other devices/software via vCard using the PREF parameter.

5. It would apply to: Phone, Email, Address, Instant messaging, Social network, Website, Related person, Related Organisation

Benefits
This would be intuitive to most users, since other interfaces use the same paradigm (Android, Google and Apple for example), and 'favourites' is fairly clearly assigned by a star symbol. Since the star is used for preferred contact details in other systems, and the Preference will be synced over, it will very useful when users have multiple phone numbers for a contact, and can't be expected to remember which is the main one, and want that one dialed straight-off without searching.

Example:
Mary has 3 mobiles, a work phone, and a home phone. User designates one of her mobiles as preferred, helping her remember which to call first, and this will also sync to the User's smartphone via CardDAV, making dialling easier.

[mburnicki]

+1

Other carddav clients also evaluate this. For example, Android 6 also shows "starred" phone numbers or email addresses first, and you can select the default/preferred entry on the phone.

In the cardbook addon for Thunderbird you can mark entries as "preferred".

For this app it would be specifically bad if you edit a vcard which has some "prefs" settings, and the prefs get lost if you save your changes. Haven't tried this, yet, but e.g. current versions of the contact editor in KDE do things like this, so it's actually unusable for editing. You can just look up some information with such programs and need to take care not to click the "save" button unintentionally.

[rsnitsch]

Finally I know why my CardDAV sync is buggy: It never saves the preferred phone number for my contacts. The 'wrong' phone numbers always reappear after some time (probably after each Nextcloud sync) at the top. Because of this, I called my contacts multiple times using the wrong phone number (e.g. calling them at the office late at night, instead of using the mobile phone number).

[skjnldsv]

Duplicate #202