Transferring of data between accounts

[Marius Melzer <marius rasumi net>]

Hi everyone,

I have a problem with my Gnome Contacts and I don't really know how to
resolve this. I initially got my contacts into Gnome Contacts by the
Owncloud Online Account. After I reinstalled my owncloud last week,
apparently Gnome Contacts changed without asking the default where the
data should go (observable on "Change Adress Book") to Local Adress Book
instead of the Owncloud one where the contacts originated from. It also
didn't warn me that I would now add locally saved information to
owncloud contacts. So after having spent some hours into adding
additional information to my contacts in the Gnome Contacts app I
realised that they did not appear on the owncloud. So Gnome Contacts let
me add contact information to an Owncloud contact and saved them (and
only them, not the rest of the contact) to the local adress book. This
is already a bit strange behaviour, isn't it? I realised this "split"
after I deactivated my owncloud online account and activated it again
because then I had all the changed accounts twice: One time only with
the local changes that I made and a second one with the current state of
the owncloud. Gnome Contacts then asks me every time when I click on one
of the Owncloud contacts if I want to join it with the other contact
(the local one), but if I click yes, nothing really happens. Both
contact stay there as they were. Also: I can only guess that the
contacts with the new changes are local and the other ones from the
owncloud, I can't see that anywhere. Also I don't really understand what
should actually happen when clicking on "yes" to the join. Would the
information then be added to the local or the owncloud contact? Only a
theoretical question because it doesn't seem to work.

Long story short, my questions are:
(1) Can you imagine a good way to solve my problem, I don't really want
to manually add all the information again and delete the local contacts
(2) Would a development version of gnome contacts help solve the
problem? (e.g. because the merging works there?) I'm using the stable
3.18.1 right now.
(3) How could an improved workflow look like that doesn't allow such
problems with activating/deactivating online accounts? Would it be easy
to change it in the code? I don't know the source yet but I could
imagine making some small changes if it helps me and others to solve
those problems or prevent them from happening.

One idea for the prevention would be that information to be added to a
contact of an online account will not just be saved locally (even if the
local one is the standard address book at that time) - just new contacts
will be saved in standard one. And it would be really nice to be able to
move contacts between address books. Is that in progress or future work?

Yours,
Marius