Re: Category support in adsressbook

[Tom Billiet <mouse256 ulyssis org>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Billiet
Time: 08-01-07 15:54

Hi,

I'm currently looking if it's possible to add category support for the addressbook when syncing with evolution.  As far as I found there is currently no support for it, so I started looking at the code trying to hack it myself :-)
But I'm a bit confused understanding the code. I think the most important things need to be changed in the addressbook conduit file from evolution (addressbook/conduit/address-conduit.c). But looking at that file it seems some work on category support has already been done. At least, the categories from the palm are read and first stored in a structure, but then discarded as far as I understand. Is there anybody who can give some more information about this?
Second when I look at the function: static GnomePilotRecord
local_record_to_pilot_record (ECalLocalRecord *local,
                  ECalConduitContext *ctxt,
                  unsigned char *record,
                  int maxRecordLen)
{
which is designed to convert a record from evolution to palm.  This method contains a structure ECalLocalRecord *local, and this structure has a member category, but this value always seems to be 0.  This function is called from the function "compare" and "prepare", but I have actually no clue from where these functions are called, and so I don't know where the ECalLocalRecord *local structure is actually made. Can somebody help me and put me on the right track for this?  I guess it has something to do with the "gtk_signal_connect (retval, "prepare", (GtkSignalFunc) prepare, ctxt);" functions, but I have no experience with gtk/gnome programming, so it's still somewhat confusing to me.

Thanks,
Tom

Okay,
To answer to my own mail: I still haven't found where the "compare" and "prepare" functions are called, but I noticed it's not needed. I do have a working category syncing now :-)
But not too enthusiast, I still have a 3 problems left:
1) (the biggest problem) Every item you read from the palm has a category, which is a number (id). But so I have no idea what the name of that category is, and I can't find a function to convert that id to a name or get a list of all the categories in the palm. I'm sure this is possible, but I'm overlooking it in the pilot-link doc's, can anybody help me on this?
2) Evolution has support for adding an item to more than 1 category, palm doesn't have this support. Now I'm only using the first category and ignoring the rest if an item has more categories. I don't see any other solution.
3) Putting an item in an non-existent  category in evolution doesn't create a new category, but the item is added to that category (categories are stored as a string of comma separated values in evolution). So you have to create the category yourself in evolution. No big deal, as it will still work if the category is non-existent.  I haven't tried creating a new category on the palm, but I found functions in pilot link for doing this, so I think that won't be a big problem. But I first need to be able to determine whether a category is already available in palm, which brings me back to point 1 :-)

If somebody can help me on this I can fix these problems and send my patch.

Greetings,
Tom