Importing contacts to GPE
 

Well, I'm about to give up, but I'll make one last desperate plea: has anyone successfully imported contact data from a Palm device to GPE contacts on the N800? I've tried every way I can think of. The Vcard support in GPE and gpesyncd doesn't seem to like anything I give it, even a simple card with just name and phone number fails. I tried to get Opensync running on my Ubuntu machine, but I can't seem to find a plug-in that will work with my Zire71 (and I'm not really sure what I would do with the data if I could sync it anyway).

Is my only choice re-typing all my contacts?

-Scurrie

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Just PDF them if you only want to carry them around for reference.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

sync your palm device with kpilot, grab the resulting vcf file from kaddressbook and import it into openhand's version of the gpe contacts application. took me all of 2 minutes.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

achitnis, are you saying that you successfully got GPE Contacts to import a vcf file containing more than one vcard contact? I've tried that, but GPE Contacts always chokes with an unspecified error. Are you using any special version of GPE Contacts? Can you open your vcf file with a text editor and see what the format looks like? Post an example of one contact maybe?

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

This:

http://cobb.uk.net/770/index.html#opensync

Suggests you can sync contacts over bluetooth with a mobile phone, if this is the case (it looks a bit beyond me) and your phone was in sync with Outlook it could be possible, assuming I have understood the article correctly.

Edit: also a sync method being worked on here (not ready yet).
http://www.pimlico-project.org/

I also found this which claims to work too.
http://www.cleardefinition.com/page/...d_GPE_on_N800/

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Ok, some progress: I have found that I can export all my online Yahoo Contacts to a single VCF file (Yahoo is also good at importing contacts from other sources, so it's a good Contacts exchange mechanism).

I can then (in theory) import multiple contacts in one VCF file to gpe Contacts on the N800. I don't really care about sync, since this can be done occasionally as a one-shot update.

Unfortunately I have to say that vCard importer in gpe Contacts is one of the least robust pieces of software I have ever encountered (I have a more colorful description, but I don't think you need to hear it :mad:). It's incredibly picky about what it will accept, and it if there's a single error anywhere in the entire import file, it aborts without importing anything, and displays only "Import failed" with no indication of what or where the error was.

So far in about 100 tests I have gotten about 1/2 of my contacts imported, stumbling over one error after another by process of elimination. I obviously haven't found them all yet. Here's some of the ones I know about:
- While gpe Contacts will accept the qualification "CHARSET=UTF-8" (used by Yahoo), it apparently doesn't know what that is, so special characters in the forms =hh or &#hhh; or &code; will not be translated.
- Any appearance of any of these codes in the N or FN (name) fields will cause import of the VCF file to fail
- Since the "=" character has special meaning in VCF files (line continuation), any other appearance of this character in the file at all causes import to fail
- gpe Contacts also doesn't like single or double quote characters to appear anywhere, or it will cause import of the file to fail
- Yahoo uses a 2-digit number in the Rev field, while gpe Contacts apparently expects a date+time value in the format used by Outlook. Instead of being ignored, the Yahoo 2-digit value causes import of the file to fail.

And BTW, editing a VCF file with Windows Notepad corrupts it invisibly for Linux purposes by adding a 3 character UTF-8 marker header to the file (EF BB BF - I have to remember to remove it with Hexedit after every edit).

Thank goodness for Wizard Mounter allowing direct access between systems, or these tests would take forever. I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to develop a simple set of automated edits to apply that will let me transfer the entire Yahoo file in one shot.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Yes! Success! Finally.

Another 50 or so failed test imports, three more bugs found, and it's done.

- For some reason, some accented characters (like e accent acute) slip through Yahoo's export filter without being translated to UTF-8 representation - apparently there's some disagreement about whether this is required. They cause gpe Contacts to choke on the file.

- Yahoo exports the Birthday field with only a single digit (no leading zero) for single-digit months and days. I count that as a silly bug in Yahoo's exporter. But gpe Contacts, instead of ignoring the field or misreading it, chokes on the file.

- My Yahoo Contacts list has managed somehow to accumulate a few Yahoo Messenger ID entries which have only a messenger ID and no name field. For these entries Yahoo exports a vCard with no name fields. That of course causes gpe Contacts to choke on the file.

After fixing these 10 or so errors/incompatibilities in the Yahoo Contacts vcf export file, the entire file with about 300 contacts imports successfully to gpe Contacts on the N800.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

In case anyone was wondering how to quickly get rid of all existing gpe contacts when doing an all-contacts update import, you can find the contacts database file in directory ~/.gpe. Shell there with X-Term and "rm contacts" to delete it. gpe Contacts will create a new empty file on next run.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Hi

I tried to import just one single contact by making a .vcf (from MS Outlook 2007).
No succes.
If I open the vcf it contains a lot of stuff (crap created by MS??) that makes no sense to me - might be the problem.
Any way to get rid of this?
And any way of making a single vcf for the entire collection of contacts? (Still from Outlok).
Likewise: Is it possible to export calendar either from Outlook or Oracle into a file that GPE calendar will accept?
This will of course not be sync, but better than nothing...
I'm on a n810.

I have also tried installing KDE - so far not succesfully.
But would I get better calendar/contacts sync from that?
bruus@daimi.au.dk

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

hmm weird seeing people have so much trouble with this, i found it to be quite easy to transfer contacts. All i did was find an doption called send all contacts on my cell, choose bluetooth, and open the file in gpe contacts. worked on first try

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

It all depends on what application created the vcf file. There are a lot of format variations, and GPE Contacts is very picky about what it will accept. You just got lucky.

I'm creating an Excel spreadsheet vcf cleaner to take care of the Yahoo vcf -> GPE problems. I'll post a link when it's done. I'm understanding the character set encoding problem better now - it looks like Yahoo exports genuine UTF-8, but then further encodes the UTF-8 output for HTML compatibility (e.g., the accented character a-acute is E1h in the standard Windows ANSI character set - that becomes two 8-bit characters C3h A1h in UTF-8, but then gets further altered to the 6 characters =C3=A1 in Yahoo's exported vcf file - but GPE Contacts can't read any of these forms without choking).

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I'm pretty convinced it is impossible to import anything into GPE contacts. I've tried every format I can think of, but nothing shows up. The closest I came was, as mentioned above, to sync with kaddressbook, then export vcard, and import the vcf file to GPE. I get a "import successful" message, but still no contacts. Whatever format is expected by GPE, it isn't a "standard"!

-Scurrie

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

scurrie, you are correct - the vCard Import function is broken in GPE Contacts for OS2008. It worked in OS2007, but we're out of luck for the moment.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

hmm, i got my phones contacts imported in gpe contacts by transfering the whole book as a vcard file onto the N800 running OS08. it took some time importing, and it seems to have a bit of trouble sorting them as i have people on only first name, first two names or full names. and it keeps sorting on the first letter of the last name...

now, if one could get syncml going...

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I see the same symptom as scurrie - it says the import was successful, but it wasn't. I've checked inside the contacts file and verified that no data is being imported. This is using the same vcf files that imported successfully to GPE Contacts previously in OS2007. Even the simplest vcf file won't import correctly.

I installed the most recent OS2008 version from Graham Cobb's repository at http://www.cobb.uk.net/apt/ (2.8+maemo+syn20080114-1 gpe packaged with mud). From the description of work in progress there it looks like things are a bit unstable with the OS2008 release at the moment. The package name suggests that there was a new build 2 days ago.

If your version is working to import a vcf file on OS2008, perhaps you installed a different version or an earlier version?

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

nope, exact same one.
at least thats what it looks like from checking app manager.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Hmmm, looks like we're missing some important variable here. Perhaps one of the support libraries? Do you have about 6 libraries in the installed apps list below GPE Contacts that all list the same source file (2.8+maemo+syn20080114-1 gpe)?

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

lets see...

libcontactsdb0
libeventdb2
libgpepimc0
libgpevtype1
libgpewidget1
libmimedir-gnome0
libtododb0

looks like i have 7, not 6.

but at least one of them could be a left over from me trying out gpe calendar and then attempting a clean up afterwards.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Me too, same libraries.

But I've discovered that the problem is not GPE Contacts, it's in OS2008's network file access!

As a shortcut in transferring a vcf file from my Windows PC to the N800, I just import it directly from a shared folder on the PC to GPE Contacts. That worked fine using Wizard Mounter in OS2007. In OS2008 it appears to work, but something's going wrong - GPE Contacts says it imported the file successfully, but no data shows up. If I copy the same vcf file to local memory using the File Manager, the operation succeeds and the vcf file contents show up correctly in GPE Contacts.

Therefore, it looks like there's a bug in the network file access in OS2008. :eek:

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

funny, kinda like that osx file move bug in reverse? ;)

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I got it working, but it was a struggle. Try this:

Get your .vcf file ready. Open it up in a text editor.

Replace "BEGIN:VCARD" with "ADD VCARD BEGIN:VCARD" (don't use the quotes)

Next, replace "END:VCARD" with "END:VCARD
QUIT" (please note that I used a carriage return in there. Find a text editor that allows you to search and replace with regular expressions.

Now run: gpesyncd < yourfile.vcf

Please tell me this works. I actually went one step farther to get it to work (I used a short perl script to split each address into separate files). If you don't have to do that, so much better. If you need it, I'll gladly post the script.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I was full of hope for a moment...... damn, no luck here.

I used this web site to convert an Outlook .csv to .vcf

http://homepage.mac.com/phrogz/CSV2vCard_v2.html

Then used your text changes but still failed.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Ok time to pull out the big guns.

Take your original .vcf (you don't need the manual changes I got you to do before) and pass it to this script. I suggest you make another directory for this, because you're going to have a lot of files.

You should have one .vcf file per contact with the gpesyncd changes in there already. Now, it's importing time! Make sure you do this as user, because it's user's contacts.

Again, keep me posted.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Wait, my spreadsheet vcf cleaner is almost done.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

After the difficulties discussed in this thread, I was a bit surprised (but gratified) that I was able to export my address book as vCard (2.1) from Lotus Notes, then import to GPE, on the first pass. It took a LONG time to import the file, though . . . my address book was only 69K, but it took 20-25 minutes for the import to finish. I thought for sure it had given up the ghost. The addresses were slightly munged in the process (city and state were transposed), but nothing I can't clean up manually.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Hmmm, this was my problem too. I was importing from a SMB share on my NAS (NSLU2). I copied the file to the local SD card and tried the import again. This time I got contacts, lots of them! That makes you wonder....
-Scurrie

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Yeah, my job titles were added to the first names. Made for some interesting names, but easily cleaned up.

Now that I have a clean contacts list, how does one back up this data? I'm sure there will be another OS update coming sooner or later...
-Scurrie

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Sweet. Gonna do one for ical ics? Pretty please?

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Ok, I am officially ready to give up. While it's technically possible to import a vcf file to GPE Contacts by editing out enough of the content, it's just too much effort to develop an automated file adapter. So far I've probably made more than 500 painstakingly-slow test imports, stumbling over one idiotic non-robust import restriction after another. The lack of any error reporting except "Import failed" makes it horribly difficult to isolate problems. The vcf import routine in this app should be used as a textbook example of how not to write robust programs.

A few examples:

- carriage-return/linefeed are allowed in some fields as the 6-character sequence =0D=0A, but are not allowed in other fields (like the Tel number), disagreeing partly with many of the apps that export vcf files

- long lines can be continued by a trailing = sign - except for some fields (like the Tel field) where the programmer apparently assumed that it would always be short and forgot to check

- if a continuation line after a trailing = anywhere in the file contains only one character, the importer fails - the programmer apparently having assumed that all continuation lines must contain more than one character or you wouldn't have bothered to continue it

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Don't know if anyone has a Mac but tried a sample export out of Address Book on Leopard of about 11 contacts into a Vcard. Transfered it to my N800 via bluetooth and then imported into GPE contacts and everything works and showed up exactly as what is on my Mac. Gonna try it tonight with a larger export. Will admit took about 1 minute to process but they were all correct.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Actually I have it more-or-less working - I just feel like griping about the difficulty of debugging apps with inadequate error messages. :mad: :)

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I imported the contacts I exported out of JPilot, and it went without a hitch, except for the city and state being reversed. That's not a huge problem, though. It was dramaless and uneventful.

Spreadsheet
 

Ok, my first cut at an Excel spreadsheet converter for Yahoo Contacts -> GPE Contacts is done and working. It manages to convert about 1000 of my personal and business contacts successfully from a couple of different Yahoo accounts, but consider it "beta" until a few other people have tested it. I stumbled across many, many minor problems and bugs that couldn't have been anticipated, so there are undoubtedly more yet to be found. The zipped spreadsheet file is attached to this message (I hope).

In the end I was pleased to see that the Categories from Yahoo Contacts are carried through to Categories in GPE Contacts, although GPE Contacts is painfully slow to filter by category. However GPE Contacts does not appear to recognize updated contact information by ID, so any updates will add a new contact rather than replacing an existing one. See my earlier instructions for removing the existing contacts file and re-creating an empty one if you get too much clutter.

A few more warnings:
- Don't attempt to import a vcf file over the network directly from GPE Contacts. There's some sort of bug between GPE Contacts and OS2008's network file access which prevents that from working. Copy the file to local memory on the N800 first.
- Don't edit the vcf file with the Notepad text editor on a Windows PC - it adds an invisible 3-byte UTF-8 header to the file which prevents GPE Contacts from reading it.
- Don't be surprised if GPE Contacts appears to freeze for a long time when you attempt to import a large vcf file - that's a good sign, as it usually comes back right away with "Failure" if there's a problem.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Looking at ics now. There's a converter here: http://manas.tungare.name/projects/yahoo2ical/

which supposedly is designed to work with Yahoo Calendar exports in Outlook csv format, or just Outlook calendar exports in the same format. Unfortunately it doesn't work in my first test. Similar problems to GPE Contacts, it fails with a "UTF-8 encoding error", location unspecified in a 600 Kbyte file.

Update: I tried the Yahoo -> Outlook csv -> Google Calendar -> ics -> GPE Calendar route. It's possible to do this operation entirely on the N800, but microB has some bugs displaying the Google Calendar page which makes it difficult. This multi-step transfer actually works for a few simple appointments, but a full-scale transfer produces a "Server Error" page from Google (although it seems to have done the import), and an "invalid character" from GPE Calendar when it tries to import the 1.3 Mbyte ics file exported by Google.

Looks like GPE Calendar has the same overly-picky input preferences as Contacts, and another painstaking testing process is going to be necessary to pin down the problems with any import of a practical scale.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

Ok, I adapted my spreadsheet to process ics files in the same way that it processes vcf files. That is, it reads each calendar entry from the ics file into a row of the spreadsheet, with the date of the entry duplicated in column 1 to allow easy sorting. If I sort by date and cut out the past and future entries I'm not concerned about, I end up with just the next 4 months worth of calendar entries, re-export those to an ics file, and those import successfully to GPE Calendar.

I won't bother tracking down the "invalid character" problem or anything else unless it turns up in the current calendar entries that I'm trying to transfer. In that case I should be able to identify it easily enough and add a correction routine to my spreadsheet.

If anyone wants the ics calendar file version of the spreadsheet, just ask (update: attached).

Incidentally you can find the current calendar file in the same directory as contacts if you want to delete it and start fresh. Open a command line window with XTerm and type:

$ cd ~/.gpe
$ rm calendar

So in the end I am now able to transfer both my Contacts and my current Calendar from Yahoo online to GPE Contacts and Calendar on the N800 fairly easily, and I don't mind updating manually once in a while instead of trying to manage a complicated sync operation. I count that as a success.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I tried that with my Address Book on my iMac w. OS 10.4.11.

GPE wouldn't accept vCards (i.e. all the contacts in one file), only individual cards that had to be transfered one by one to a folder on the N800 and then imported into GPE.

GPE also 'failed' every vCard that had anything beyond the most basic information (i.e. if you put anything in the Address Book's 'notes' section, the vCard was rejected by GPE).

It was easy for Contacts to import the vCards file but it's rather useless without addresses, I find. Great if you only want email addresses or primary phone numbers.

I find the process too time-consuming for GPE and Contacts misses essential information from Address Book (like notes, birthdays, addresses). Both of these applications aren't completely satisfactory for me.

Ah, well. I have that information on my iPod that's invariably close by, anyway.

Chalk it up to another quirk of the OS2008 or GPE.

I don't need a particularly robust PIM for the N800 but I guess I know not what, exactly, I must be asking of the Nokia Gods.

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I am atempting to import my contacts from a Plam TX to GPE contacts on an N810 OS2008. I have discovered many of the problems cited here but I have had some sucess using Notepad files, obviously with the .vcf append, using Windows XP pro as follows:

1. In Palm desktop select contacts view and select all
2. Export as a vCard file
3. On N810 in file manager, copy the .vcf file to local folder (eg: documents)
4. Open GPE contacts, menu, Tools, Import Vcard

I made a partial .vcf list to experiment and have brought in about the first 30 contacts and they display more or less ok. My whole file did not import, probably because of the two image files that Palm puts in by default in contacts.

The following format works fine except as noted in previous posts, the City and state are transposed in GPE:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Doe;John
FN:John Doe
TITLE:Account Manager
ORG:A Company
ADR;WORK:;;123 Long Rd;Anytown;NC;12345;USA
TEL;WORK:999-555-1234
TEL;CELL:999-555-1235
END:VCARD

Note that if you use other fields in the source file you may or may not get them through (see earlier posts).

Something else I've discovered is that if there are any other characters in the phone numbers except digits 0-9, dashes - and brackets (), the content will initially display ok BUT when editied in ANY way (ie: opened and saved instead of cancelling) any 'wrongly' formatted numbers completely dissappear! In fact, if there are odd characters in the phone number you can't even see them in edit mode.

I have just downloaded the cleanup spreadsheet (thanks given) and will see how this works out.

I could probably write a spreadsheet to transpose the city and state but perhaps this has already been done. OK off to work on this...

Re: Spreadsheet
 

Thanks for the useful spreadsheet. I could import about 800 contacts into my N810. There were duplicates due to empty Birthday fields and non-empty notes fields. BUT at least I could import my Palm and Phone contacts via Yahoo (as you suggested).

And now for the challenge - I need to figure out how to export from gpe-contacts...

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I installed gpesyncd in my n810 but no command seems to work, only help and quit work:

~$ gpesyncd
gpesyncd local mode
add
Invalid command: add

Is there someone with the same problem? How to fix it?

Re: Importing contacts to GPE
 

I just spent 4 hours importing Contacts and Calendar from Outlook to GPE on my N800. Following the great ideas provided in this thread I had no trouble with Contacts. I kept getting errors on my Calendar import and after doing it piecemeal for awhile finally discovered the problem. It would not accept the Euro symbol (€) ! Imagine that, on a european device no less.