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Difficulty importing Categories into Address Book Groups

Hi,

Is there a way when importing vCards to Address Book, for the imported contacts to be automatically assigned to an appropriate Group or Groups? I propose a work-around solution to the issue of importing Categories when adopting Apple's Address Book application, but seek a full solution. Unsolved thread examples:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6276525 (Palm)
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7312165 (Outlook)
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6226853 (Entourage)

The vCard "CATEGORIES Type Definition" does exist in Address Book (I'm working with v4.11 in OS X 10.5 Leopard); Apple uses "Group" rather than "Category." BUT, 2 issues remain:
1. You can't ascertain assigned Categories looking at a card.
2. Address Book will export the catagories, but will not import them (from what I can tell; please explain if I'm wrong).

To amplify:
If you select a card, I can't tell what group(s) it is a member of by looking at the card.

An imported card won't be placed in groups corresponding to its Categories, whether the Group name(s) pre-exist or whether using vCard 2.1 or 3.0. It appears that the Categories information is discarded on import; if you import a vCard with one or more Categories, it is not assigned to any groups, and if you immediately turn around and export it, no Categories information is exported. Consequently, a global find-and-replace text edit of the vCard file to be imported doesn't solve the issue (unless there exists a specific field such as X-ABGROUPS that Address Book will import, that I don't know and can't figure out).

One Solution:
The best work-around I was able to develop: a method to quickly assign appropriate cards to their respective Groups (categories) once imported.

The Palm Desktop vCard exports the Category fields as:

X-Palm-Category1:Family
X-Palm-Category2:Business

For your information, Address Book exports groups as:

CATEGORIES:Family,Business

I performed the following:

1. Exported all contacts from Palm using vCard.

2. Imported the vCard data into Address Book.

3. Created a Group called "Family"

4. Created a "Smart Group"; Edit > Edit Smart Group > 'Note' 'contains' 'X-Palm-Category1:Family'

5. Selected all the contacts now in the Smart Group and added (drag and drop) them to the Group called "Family"

6. Repeated steps 3, 4, and 5 for each Category name (Family, Friends, Business, Work, etc.)

Request for help:

If you know a better solution to importing the category information into Address Book, please respond!

If you know how to tell, looking at a card, what Groups it is a member of, please respond and let me know how.

Thanks, Karl

iMac 24, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jan 18, 2009 6:30 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Jan 21, 2009 11:15 AM

Hi Karl,

I've been trying to work out how to do the same thing and was planning on using a similar strategy... so unfortunately I don't have a better solution at the moment. It could probably be done via an Applescript, but I don't know of one that does it and know nothing of writing them.

At least I can help out with your last point. You should be able to press the Option key when you've got a contact selected to highlight the group(s) it's a member of.

Cheers,
Mark
3 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Jan 21, 2009 11:15 AM in response to Karl Diederich

Hi Karl,

I've been trying to work out how to do the same thing and was planning on using a similar strategy... so unfortunately I don't have a better solution at the moment. It could probably be done via an Applescript, but I don't know of one that does it and know nothing of writing them.

At least I can help out with your last point. You should be able to press the Option key when you've got a contact selected to highlight the group(s) it's a member of.

Cheers,
Mark

Difficulty importing Categories into Address Book Groups

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