[Standards-JIG] Service discovery name returned by a client

[Ralph Meijer]

On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 14:54 +0100, Matthias Wimmer wrote:
> Remko Tronçon schrieb:
> > Well, you can't put that information in the service discovery request,
> > because you will only do a disco request to one contact, and re-use
> > that information for all other contacts that use the same client.
> > Therefore, to be consistent, the type, category and name should always
> > remain the same for every version or ext node.
> 
> Well right I quoted a reply to a very for the extension node. But what I
> talked about was a disco request to the users full JID but with no node.
> 
> > Is there any reason you would want that information in the disco
> > reply, and not in places like the user profile ?
> 
> As I said: The name attribute is used to pass text, that is displayed by
> a human. And I guess, that a human associates with john at example.com/home
> not the user's client, but the user.
> E.g. if I request a list of active sessions from my server, I see
> something like http://web.amessage.info/BrowseExample.png (I moved out
> the JIDs of the sessions for privacy reasons). It is unconvenient to get
> a list with x-times "Kopete", y-times "Miranda", and z-times "Psi".
> Having the user's name there would be much more useful.

Heh, that's an interesting screenshot.

In principle, I think that a full JID, the resource refers to one of the
clients (resources) that a user has connected to a service. The client's
name is a simple default, of course. A disco info response from such a
resource should not reflect the user's name, but the resource's. Of
course a disco request to a bare JID may reflect the user's name.

That said, a disco items request to the 'sessions' node of an IM server
to my jabberd2 server yields a list of active sessions, not online
users. I cannot find any formal description of this feature (it is not
registered with the XMPP registrar), but I do expect textual
descriptions of the resource there, along with the account names, maybe
like this:

   - ralphm at ik.nu
        * Gajim
        * My work resource
   - mimir at ik.nu
        * Mimír presence monitor

If you want it more user-friendly, you could disco each user's account
for a better textual representation instead of the JID, maybe a full
name.

If you want something that lists the online users (that is all accounts
that have
an active resource?), maybe you need to document and implement something
different.

-- 
Groetjes,

ralphm