Programming Jabber

Searching a JUD

The first level that we’ll build into Demo::JBook is the ability to query a JUD. The address book is to be browser-based, so we’ll generate HTML on the fly according to the search fields we receive in response to our IQ-get. It should look something like that shown in Figure 10-3.

Figure 10-3. JUD search form in HTML

The items returned in the search results don’t really provide much information:

<item jid='[e-mail]'>
  <nick>joseph</nick>
  <first>Joseph</first>
  <email>[e-mail]</email>
  <last>Adams</last>
</item>

Here, we have the user’s first and last names, his nickname, and his email address. One of the functions of the JUD is to determine which fields are storable.

JUD Fields

The fields in a JUD that are used to store the directory data are determined either by a hardcoded list in the JUD source itself or a configurable list that’s stored and maintained separate from the JUD code. The list fields allowed for searching a JUD may or may not be used for storing the information; it may be a subset (it makes no sense, of course, for it to be a superset). For example, if the fields used to store information in a JUD are:

<name/>
<email/>
<first/>
<last/>
<nick/>
<text/>

it may be that the fields available for searching may be just:

<first/>
<last/>

as shown in Example 10-1.

In case you’re wondering how to discover the fields that can be used to populate ...