Re: [Evolution] evolution :: contacts :: personal information :: no Birthday data from ews account

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Wed, 2021-06-16 at 15:20 +0200, Matthias Kuntze wrote:
> FYI: The anniversary entry changed name from "X-MS-
> ANNIVERSARY;VALUE=DATE:" to "X-EVOLUTION-ANNIVERSARY:"
>
> How can this problem be solved? Do I have to export the >1000
> contacts in Outlook and re-import it in evolution as a new contact
> folder or is there a switch telling evolution to use the right
> exchange data?

        Hi,
the evolution-ews doesn't use the vCard format during the exchange of
the data with the server, it uses the EWS protocol instead, thus the
above "X-...." attributes do not matter.

The Birthday and Anniversary read/write/update had been fixed long ago,
within [1], which your 3.36.5 has. I suspect the server doesn't return
the Birthday element or it is set to some odd value.

Could you close evolution, then remove the addressbook cache for the
EWS addressbook (it's at ~/.cache/evolution/addressbook/<uid>/; if
there are more, you can delete all of them, as they will be re-
populated the next time they are opened (the only downside is the
bandwidth use this repopulate means). Then run the addressbook factory
as this:

   $ EWS_DEBUG=2 /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory -w
&>log.txt

(the actual path can differ in your system) which will debug all the
communication between the server and the evolution-ews for every EWS
address book configured in the Evolution. I do not want that log, it
contains private information, both encoded and  in a plain text mode.
Do not share it anywhere, please.

Once the update will be done and the contacts will not have their
birthday filled, close evolution, soft-kill the factory process:

   $ kill -TERM `pidof evolution-addressbook-factory`

Then open the log.txt file and search for "Birthday" (quotes for
clarity only). That contains the date. Either the format is wrong or
it's not in the file for some/all contacts, or or some other problem
with that date is, that it cannot be read/deciphered by the evolution-
ews. You can see also the contact names, emails and such around this
Birthday, if it's there, which can give you an idea which contact it
references and what value is expected (the one shown in Outlook).

Could you share what failed according to the log, please?

        Thanks and bye,
        Milan

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution-ews/-/issues/57