Re: Transferring of data between accounts

[Marius Melzer <marius rasumi net>]

Hi,

>     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
>
>
> By creating some scripts to do it.

Is this easy to achieve? Where in the Code would I have to look for
hints how to do it? How does Gnome Contacts store its items? An
Import/Export would facilitate this, I guess. But that's not
"implemented but just not exposed by the GUI" right?

>     (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.
>
> I wonder why contacts didn't show you a Setup window, and if it did,
> what did you selected there?

Actually, the Owncloud Account was there all the time. What changed was
that I reinstalled my Owncloud on the server and (at least I guess) that
was the reason why the contacts switched to local without telling me or
without me noticing it. Then the contact appeared as one contact with
all the information but apperently the old information were in owncloud
accounts and the new local. I only recognized this when deactivating and
reactivating the Owncloud Online Account in Gnome (just the contacts)
and then the new old owncloud information disappeared for some seconds
and left the accounts with the newly added information behind. Then the
Owncloud accounts reappeared again, but this time as separate accounts
that I'm not able to merge.

>     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?
>
> It's not that easy, but it is worth thinking of if. Previously we had a
> definition, of writing details per store, but we decided it was not
> usable/clear.
> I'll work on it, and I'll let you know.

Hm, well but somehow it makes sense that the data "belongs" somewhere
doesn't it. I think people would expect a behaviour like in the android
contacts where you have different contact providers and you can switch
between them or show only some them and definitely see which contact
belongs where and move contacts from one to another but I think it's not
very intuitive that a contact can be part of two sources (e.g. some of
the fields are local and some are in the owncloud).


Yours,
Marius