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unable to import vcards into address book including birthdays

I recently upgraded to Lion. (in meantime I did a complete fresh Lion installation twice)


The same problem occurs:

Before I installed Lion I exported all my address book data into vcard-Format.

Each vcard can be opened for example with "textedit" and everything is fine.

But when I try to import these vcards in the new Lion address book all data is imported

except the birthdays. I am still able to refresh the birthday data manually.


Moreover after installing Lion Server the birthday field is switched off. I am no even more able

to type in the birthday data manually.


Anyone an idea?

Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 23, 2011 3:20 PM

Reply
16 replies

Aug 15, 2011 4:50 AM in response to AtzeP

It could possibly be a bug in Apple's address book application. If you edit one of your vcard files by hand and change the line containing the birthday looking line "BDAY:20101224" into "BDAY:2010-12-24" the import will work flawless afterwards.


So Apple's address book does not cope dates of format "YYYYMMDD" even though this format is ISO 8601 compliant (see http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcardwhite.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Calendar_dates).

Hopefully, Apple will fix this asap.


Temporarily you could use a small script to change (fix) all the unhyphenated birthday date formats in your vcard files (BACKUP BEFORE USE):

for i in *.vcf; do sed -i 's/^\(BDAY[:;].*\)\([0-9]\{4\}\)\([0-9]\{2\}\)\([0-9]\{2\}\)\s*$/\1\2-\3-\4/' $i; done

Aug 15, 2011 9:52 AM in response to Rolf Schneider

Hallo Rolf,


in my case the format of the birthday-entries in the vcards is OK. But the birthday-field does not sync via Lion Server; editing a birthday-entry on a vcard results in that same birthday-entry being deleted on the other machine, which is connected to the server! Changing birthday-entries on a connected iphone does not work at all - the change is not transmitted to the other machines, it is reset. Changing a birthday-entry on one machine leads to deleting that value on the other machine and vice versa. If I enter the same value on both machines at the same time, both machines keep that value at first. But a further change on one machine deletes the field on the other machine.


My workaround: I copied all birthday-entries in a newly created date-field, labeled it "Geburtstag" - a lot of work with more than 200 birthday entries, but: everything works fine!


Another problem is, that birthdays in addressbook without year (possible with Lion) result in the age of 407 and more in the birthday-calendar of iCal. What about that?


Henner

Aug 15, 2011 2:04 PM in response to Henner

Hallo Henner!


Maybe it's similar to my problem. I use the CalenderServer from http://trac.calendarserver.org running on a Linux Server. "The Address Book Server which shipped as part of Snow Leopard Server" ... "has been added to the existing Calendar Server Project".


The CardDAV server converts, stores and outputs the birthdays in format YYYYMMDD. This leads to a behaviour of Lion's address book (6.0) similar to your description: if a add a birthday, address book sends this date to the server, the server stores the date in unhyphenated format, address book updates it's own data, could not handle the date format and does not display the birthday. But the birthday is still present on the server and the vCard will be synchronized with Snow Leopard's and iPhone's address book which are both capable to cope with the YYYYMMDD format.


Currently I parse all vCards server-side by a small script (cronjob), create a birthday calender and subscribe to this calendar. This works good enough to wait for a bug fix of Apple's address book instead of hacking CalendarServer.


Rolf

Aug 16, 2011 1:35 AM in response to Rolf Schneider

... and you are right, of course. If I edit any one of the contact fields afterwards with Lion's address book, the updated vCard will be sent again to the server and an existing birthday will be deleted.


Conclusion: Lion Server's address book server (of course) behaves in the same manner than the vCard server from calendarserver.org. In all likelihood, it's a bug in Lion's address book client and we have to wait and hope.


Rolf

Aug 16, 2011 6:22 AM in response to Rolf Schneider

Thanks to all for the discussion. And special thanks to Rolf for your hints...


In the meantime I solved my problem with a fresh install of Lion server, activating the cardDAV service, importing the old vcard data as a csv file into mac:excel2011, exporting it to several file formats and importing to lion adressbook.

Unfortunately I cannot remember the correct format...

Jun 12, 2012 9:00 AM in response to berkshire

After posting this I did a more complete search and found this:


mcsound U.S.



Apr 30, 2012 9:22 PM (in response to AddyOn)

Sounds like there may be a corruption in the vCard data but try this, it has worked for me in the past.


Import the full list of vCards as you have been doing, all at once. Now before you exit out of Address Book, select all of the contacts you just imported. Go to the file menu and choose to export as a vCard and save it to your desktop. So you are essentially taking all the individual vCards you just imported and exporting them as a single vCard.


Now close Address Book and relaunch. The contacts will be gone but this time re import the single vCard you just created and saved to the desktop.


Now close Address Book and relaunch and see if that works.


It did work! We'll see if it persists. The original vCard file was from a Palm Treo 680, so there very well may been formatting errors or corruptions.

unable to import vcards into address book including birthdays

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