Contacts-App does not use standardized date-format (YYYYMMDD) ⇨ therefore causes issues when syncing via CalDAV/CardDAV
asked 2018-01-03 06:04:46 +0200
Hello together,
I found an issue with the Sailfish Contacts App that causes problems when syncing via CalDAV/CardDAV.
Description of the issue
The Contacts App does not use the standardized date-format (YYYYMMDD) for birthdays/anniversaries when transmitting contacts via CardDAV. Instead of that, it uses some unstandardized YYYY-MM-DD format with hyphens as separators. Because of that issue, OwnCloud, Nextcloud, Thunderbird and many other CardDAV/CalDAV-Services can not recognize the correct dates of birthdays/anniversaries from persons in the phone address book and therefore leave those fields empty.
Jolla-format:
YYYY-MM-DD⇨ problems when syncing to OwnCloud/Nextcloud/Thunderbird, etc.
Standardized format:
YYYYMMDD⇨ seamless integration into all services using CardDAV/CalDAV:
Did anyone experience the same behavior?
You can test this by yourself by simply exporting your contacts into a *.vcf-file. The nowadays *.vcf-standard is strictly YYYYMMDD, but Sailfish produces YYYY-MM-DD nevertheless (see in file).
Even the official vCard-rules as well as the international RFC 6350 standard desire to write dates in the YYYYMMDD-format (e.g. BDAY:19700310).
Could you change this in Sailfish to the worlwide harmonized YYYYMMDD-system, please?
Thank you very much!
For reference: from https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6350#section-4.3: "YYYY-MM-DD is disallowed since we are using the basic format instead of the extended format."
Federico ( 2018-01-05 20:02:48 +0200 )editGreat find, hopefully a fix will land soon.
nthn ( 2018-01-06 16:13:25 +0200 )editI remember years ago a friend of mine (who then used a Jolla phone) had problems syncing his contacts to his exchange server. After some investigation he found out that the problem only affected contacts with a birthday. I wonder if this was the reason for it... Well, he's given up on Jolla meanwhile.
ossi1967 ( 2018-01-09 09:26:03 +0200 )editHi.
In my home server I use radicale and I have found no problems whatsoever. I also use thunderbird at home and will check it this afternoon...
EDIT: I couldn't find any options in Thunderbird to import from my CardDAV server.....
Regards.
Pasko ( 2018-01-09 11:33:33 +0200 )editThank you for your participation!
- @Federico: Thanks a lot for the reference! Yeah, they also say:
- @nthn: I think we have to excite Damien and @chris.adams about this thread... Unfortunately this forum doesn't provide any personal message-function I fear?
- @ossi1967: In my case, though the birthdays get synced to
- @Pasko: You need to install the Add-on
Picanha ( 2018-01-10 07:00:41 +0200 )editYYYYMMDD(= 19850412) has to be used! I added your reference into my original post - thanks!CardDAV(even with the incorrect date format), but later on any software tries to use the wrong "Jolla-format" and complains about the unusable date format (and therefore doesn't display it's value).CardBookfirst, then you can add a network address book to Thunderbird viaCardDAV.