> I've just started trying to use SyncBBDB to syncronize records between
> BBDB and my Palm III. It looks great, I think that I will finally be
> able to have addresses stay in sync on both. I have it working now
> for the most part, but I have encountered a number of
> problems/inconveniences/wish list items that I haven't been able to
> fully solve myself yet. Roughly from most serious, they are:
>
> 1) Some category names are not set going from BBDB->Palm. As far as I
> can tell, this only happens when there is more than one phone number
> and/or email address. When viewing the record, the fields come out
> without any label at all, or sometimes a square in place of a label.
> I can then edit the field to "Home", "Work", "E-mail", etc. Perhaps
> this is a problem with the translations file? Mine is:
Are these always the same BBDB labels? So perhaps always your
BBDB aka, or www? Your text seems to make it seem like it's more normal
stuff like 'home' and 'work'. Example records are usually the easiest way
to track this sort of thing down.
> The only thing I can think of is that I often have categories in BBDB
> for both address and phone numbers with the same name, e.g. "home" or
> "work". Could this be causing a problem in the translation?
This shouldn't cause a problem and is in fact recommended as SyncBBDB
will then try to make the bbdb field with the same label as the address
the 'primary' field for the Palm record.
> 2) I think that empty name fields or business name fields should stay
> set to nil rather than "". SyncBBDB has taken every single BBDB entry
> and converted nil to "", so that now names get displayed as:
> "John Smith - " (always with a following hyphen, before the [blank]
> business name). Even if I set an individual entry back to nil, it
> gets set to "" again at the next sync.
Hmm, I'll look into this. Unfortunately, I suspect that something will
only accept "" and not 'nil'. Which means I'll need to seriously uglify
(TM) the code to what wants what :(
> 3) It always does a full sync, rather than a fast sync. This is true
> whether I use SyncBBDB as a PilotManager conduit or use bootstrap from
> the command line (which I prefer).
> 4) Running from the command line (bootstrap) runs fine, but gives an
> error message of "Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference
> at SyncUtil/StandAloneHost.pm line 89." at the end each time. Has it
> left something unfinished, perhaps this is why it never does a fast
> sync?
Yes, this is the problem. it's trying to update it's prefs file in
it's conduit dir. It should print the prefs file it's trying to use when
it starts up, probably the directory doesn't exist. I'll see about making
it a little clearer what's happening.
> 5) It would be nice if there was a way to omit BBDB entries that have
> no name or business name associated with them. I have gotten around
> this by setting a pilot-ignore flag in all of these unnamed records,
> but that is not completely satisfactory because any new unnamed
> records will still be added.
Well this is the sort of thing that should probably be handled on the
BBDB side. If you need I'll see if I can code up a skeleton hook function
that can annotate records with this field when created/edited (I'm
pretty sure BBDB has all the required infrastructure).
> 6) I'm not always fond of having a BBDB record split into multiple
> Palm records. I can see why this makes sense as a general conversion
> method, but it would be nice to be able to override this behavior.
> For example, it would be nice to be able to set a custom field to
> "work address" or similar and have that include the 2nd address from a
> BBDB entry. Is there any way to do this currently?
No unless you are willing to live with the address as 'note' in BBDB.
Otherwise SyncBBDB would have tomunge and unmunge the data into a string
and back to an address record. This is hard, and will almost always have
problems with the address format used in some country in bangladesh.
If you are willing to have it treated as a string simply make it a
note in BBDB.
> 7) On the BBDB side, there doesn't seem to be a general way to hide a
> field. SyncBBDB generates a pilot-id field for every record, and it
> would be nice to keep this field hidden in BBDB, in general. Is there
> a way to do this that I haven't found?
;; Fields to skip when showing 'full' entries.
(setq bbdb-elided-display '(creation-date timestamp pilot-info))
;; Fields to skip when 'poping-up' entries.
(setq bbdb-pop-up-elided-display '(creation-date timestamp aka address
pilot-info attribution))
;; Fiels to skip when printing 'full' entries...
(setq bbdb-print-elide '(creation-date timestamp notes
tex-name aka mail-alias
attribution pilot-info))
Hope this helps.
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