Create a search feature to find people

[SharonStrats]

Would be nice to have a feature to be able to find solid users by name and grab their webIDs. It would also be nice to have it configurable, in that when you select a person you could configure what you want to happen. For example adding the person to a meeting, adding them as a friend or contact, chatting with them, or simply looking at their profile. I'm thinking opening another tab with their profile displayed would be the default if the consumer doesn't pass in another action.

There is currently an api provided by solid-contrib here that we could use to find all users.

When the user is logged in it would be beneficial to also find their friends and contacts so they could take some action on them as well. Either viewing their profile as mentioned previously, perhaps pulling them up in the contact pane to change data, starting a chat, adding them to a meeting, sharing a document to name a few.

Potentially this could be configured as well to find only the users friends, contacts or all. Would it be useful to have the search on the socialPane for instance where only friends are found... or perhaps this is too much....

[SharonStrats]

@timea-solid I have the basics done.

• the search uses the webid search from solid-contrib for finding people
• if logged in it also finds the users contacts and friends
• a consumer can pass in it's own action to take when a user is selected.
• default is to open a tab on their webid to view the profile.
• I ended up removing the indicator for identifying whether the person is a friend, contact or just 'people' because that would mean extending the existing combobox. But I could add this back in if you think it's useful.

I started wondering where this might be used, for instance if we need it to in some cases search only through friends or contacts.

what are your thoughts on what's been done so far, should I add configuration for the data that is returned (friends, contacts, or all), and do you think we need the indicator?

[yousseeff20]

I think adding configuration for the search scope would be useful, especially because different consumers may have very different contexts.

Maybe expose something like:

{
  sources: ["friends", "contacts", "global"],
  onSelect: (person) => {
    // custom consumer action
  }
}

This way:

• socialPane could limit results to friends/contacts
• sharing flows could search everyone
• meetings could decide their own behavior

For the friend/contact indicator, I think it is worth keeping if possible, but maybe as optional metadata instead of extending the combobox UI directly.

Example:

{
  name: "User",
  webId: "...",
  relationship: "friend" | "contact" | "global"
}

Then consumers can decide whether they want to display badges, icons, grouping, or ignore it.

The current default behavior of opening the WebID profile when no action is provided sounds like a good fallback.