Contacts are at the heart of instant messaging, and thus the Chat Core has a way to abstract to a "person" (represented by an imIContact instance), which might connect to multiple networks, etc.
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The display name used in the buddy list window or in conversations can come from several sources, by precedence order:
- User-set alias, stored locally (set when the user renames someone from Thunderbird)
- Server-stored alias (some protocol store the aliases online)
- Display name / Friendly name (set by the remote contact, stored on the server)
- Username, the unique identifier of the buddy for this protocol. Can be numbers (e.g. ICQ, QQ), email addresses (e.g. MSN, XMPP) or some other string.
Possible storage locations:
- mozStorage (the file blist.sqlite)
- chat core (cached copy)
- server read/write (server-stored alias)
- server read only (display names)