[Kde-pim] Review Request: vCard export: export birthday field as date only

[Jonathan Marten]

> On Jan. 23, 2012, 6:05 p.m., Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > Just to be sure I understand this correctly: do certain applications have a problem with parsing a time in the BDAY field or are they just not accepting midnight UTC?
> > If they are generally incapable of dealing with standard VCard and are unlikely to be fixed we should probably consider them a special export format instead.

For those that I am able to test - Android and Gmail - it appears that the presence of the time is the problem, not it being set to midnight.  The vCard file

BEGIN:VCARD
BDAY:1965-04-10T01:02:03Z
EMAIL;TYPE=PREF:foo at bar.com
FN:Foo Bar
N:Bar;Foo;;;
UID:M5VE64gMYm
VERSION:3.0
END:VCARD

fails to import the birthday;  however if the 2nd line is changed to

BDAY:1965-04-10

then that date is imported correctly.

I'm not convinced that having to have a special export format just to cover these - which are not exactly obscure applications - is the right approach.  There is no GUI and no facility for time-of-birthday to be entered in KAddressBook, so anything output here is pure invention anyway.  Even with the time removed, the resulting vCard is still standards compliant in every way so there should be no reason to have a special format.


- Jonathan


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On Jan. 23, 2012, 5:13 p.m., Jonathan Marten wrote:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/103776/
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> (Updated Jan. 23, 2012, 5:13 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for KDEPIM.
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> The referenced bugs refer to the BDAY field in an exported vCard including a time field of midnight, even though the user will not have entered this in KAddressBook and there is no GUI to do so:
> 
> BDAY:1978-07-20T00:00:00Z
> 
> This is valid according to RFC2426, but unfortunately some receiving applications - notable GMail and Android - do not recognise the birthday field in this format and ignore it.  If the time part is removed:
> 
> BDAY:1978-07-20
> 
> then the birthday date is recognised.
> 
> This patch implements that, only for vCard export from KAddressBook.  It does not modify or change the behaviour of the KABC library, so not affecting any other applications that may use this format with a valid time (and kdelibs is frozen now anyway).
> 
> 
> This addresses bugs 118289 and 282169.
>     http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118289
>     http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=282169
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   kaddressbook/xxport/vcard/vcard_xxport.cpp bb4211b 
> 
> Diff: http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/103776/diff/diff
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> Build kdepim with these changes, checked vCard export by visual inspection of the output and by import into GMail Contacts.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jonathan Marten
> 
>

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