[Design] Forwarding and Replying to Recurring Events

[Mimi Yin]

Again, while reviewing: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/ 
Journal/DashboardSharingCommunicationsRecurrence, we got stuck on how  
Reply, Reply All and Forward should work for Recurring events. As I  
mentioned in my last email about Read/Unread status, we are NOT  
supporting Sending, Forwarding and Updating of individual instances  
or subsets of recurring event series. Instead, any time the user  
performs a Communications related operation with a recurring event,  
the entire series is affected (e.g. Addressing the event).

However, I had a question for the engineers about whether this  
strictness was necessary for Replies, since replies don't deal with  
the actual recurring event.

This then led to a tangential discussion about what we should display  
in the Notes field when Forwarding or Replying to an event series  
that has modified instances in it. (Today, we print an event's  
metadata in the Notes field and derive the Title field from the Event  
Title field when Forwarding and Replying to regular, non-recurring  
events). If a recurring event has a different Title for each  
instance, What do we display in the Forward and/or Reply?

===

How should forward work on recurring events? What do we display in  
the Notes field when forwarding a recurring event series that has  
modified instances in it?
    * Can we just display the attribute values from the Master event?

How should reply work on recurring events?
    * Can we reply to individual instances of a recurring event, or  
the 'This and Future' subset of a recurring event series?
    *  If so, can we mark individual instances of a recurring event  
or the 'This and Future' subset of a recurring event series as 'Needs  
reply'?

Replying to an individual instance or the 'This and Future' subset of  
a recurring event series would mean the following:
    * Displaying the right thing in the Notes field of Reply message:
       * If you are replying to the entire series, display the  
metadata from the master event
       * If you are replying to a single instance, display the  
metadata from that single instance
       * If you are replying to the 'This and Future' subset of the  
recurring event series, display the metadata from the
    * Allowing users to choose between All, Just this event, and This  
and Future when marking an item as 'Needs reply'.
    * Post-preview, it will mean keeping track of which instances, or  
which subset of instances have been 'Replied to'.

Please see Alpha 4 email spec for more details about what 'display  
the metadata from' means: http://svn.osafoundation.org/docs/trunk/ 
docs/specs/rel0_7/Email-0.7.html

Mimi

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