[Owncloud] FYI: Contacts Sync Problem with iPhone IOS 5.0.1 solved!

[Lyall Pearce]

Hello,

I Just thought I would let the list know that I have my iPhone syncing 
contacts and calendars with OwnCloud 4.0.7 on Gentoo Linux, 64 bit.

Great stuff.

However, I did have problems getting my iPhone 4s (IOS 5.0.1) to sync 
contacts with OpenCloud, initially.

It turned out that *one* of my contacts had a bogus couple of characters 
in the HOME address. This list of

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
TEL;TYPE=CELL:+123456789
ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;36\n^yth St;ATown;SA;5000;Australia

where the characters between the '36' and the 'th' was reverse slash 'n' 
followed by CTRL-Y.

This contact was exported from Exchange 2010 using Outlook 2010 and the 
original export file, from Outlook, looked like this...

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N;LANGUAGE=en-us:Name; Another
FN:Another Name
TEL;CELL;VOICE:+123456789
ADR;HOME;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:;;36=0A=19th St;ATown;SA;5000;Australia

where the address was supposed to be "36<newline>19th St", but it 
appears the OwnCloud import misinterpreted the =19 as a hex character 
rather than the equals as a 'newline' and the 19 as the 2 ascii 
characters "19".

I am not sure whose fault this is, Exchange or OwnCloud, my limited 
understanding of VCARD encoding is that Outlook should have split the 
line after the 0A=, causing the 19 to not be interpreted as a hex char.

Editing the address in the OwnCloud Web GUI to re-type the address fixed 
the problem and sync worked.

Symptoms on the iPhone was a complete failure to sync, depending upon 
the number of contacts available, and if any sort of sync happened at 
all, it was around 28 contacts, rather than the 200+ in OwnCloud.

I guess it was just bad luck which determined which block of contacts 
the iPhone requested, and how early in the sync the contact arrived and 
crashed the whole sync process. It would have been nice if the iPhone 
had at least had the courtesy to say there was a corrupt contact and 
that the sync was aborted. I spent ages digging around with wireshark 
before I resorted to a  binary split of my contacts list into ever 
smaller lists, until I found the corrupted contact.


Nice tool, I like the sync, pity the web GUI is so flakey, but now that 
the iPhone and iPad is working, who needs the web GUI anyway :)

...Lyall