Contact Views

Contact Views provide an easy way for a UI to create a view containing sorted contact data. A Contact View is a sorted collection of Contact Items that is continually updated on receipt of observer events from the Contacts Model. Most Contacts Model clients require views in which the contacts are either sorted by type (contacts with email addresses, for example) or by their position between two characters.

There are two main types of view: For Local views (CContactLocalView) the data is allocated to the client’s memory. For Remote views (CContactRemoteView) data is allocated within the memory of the contact's server and can be shared by multiple clients.

Within the server the local view object is associated with each client side remote view object. This configuration allows multiple clients to share the same server side view objects, thereby reducing the overhead associated with initial sorting of the view data, and keeping it in sync with the underlying data. Remote views should therefore be used when the same view is likely to be needed by more than one client.

The Contact Views library contains more specialised views and allows clients to specify views by field, methods and sort order. The CContactViewBase class includes:

• Group view (CContactGroupView) - provides a view where all the contacts belonging to the group will be displayed. CContactGroupView::TGroupType defines whether the view displays either all contacts belonging to the group or all contacts not part of this group.

• Find view (CContactFindView) - contains Contact Items from the underlying view that match the search criteria

• Filtered view (CContactFilteredView) - provides a view containing only contacts with a specified field

• Sub view (CContactSubView) – presents a 'window' of data over a (potentially) larger data set. As the underlying data in CContactViewBase is modified, objects of this class will keep themselves up to date.

• Concatenated view (CContactConcatenatedView) – joins multiple contact views from CContactViewBase into a single contiguous view.