Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Exporting contacts as vcard files

I added a new action ExportVCardFile which exists now on every list of partners (if your application has use_vcard_export set to True, which is used e.g. in Lino Amici or in lino_book.projects.min2).

vCard and icalendar files use the same syntax, and fortunately we have vobject which simplifies things greatly.

The feature seems not very useful as long as contact clients have no feature for deleting duplicate entries. In Evolution this seems to be at least tricky, you need to manually download and install the correct debian file of a plugin. https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1352205

Readings:

• The sad story of the vCard format and its lack of interoperability

• http://luc.lino-framework.org/dl/luc.vcf

• vCard Format Specification (RFC 6350)

• Parameter Value Encoding in iCalendar and vCard (RFC 6868).

• Notes on vCard, LDIF and mappings to RDF

• vCard MIME Directory Profile (RFC2426)

• A MIME Content-Type for Directory Information (RFC2426)