>Thank you very much for such prompt response. The information >you provided does help, but also brings some confusion. >I do not need to interact w/ handheld device. I believe there >are exporting utilities available within the device's that allow user to >export address books into the Address Book Archive (.ABA file). >Given this file (myAddressBook.aba for example) I want to do one >of the two things: iether write the script that will extract contact >info from this file derectly or write the script that will convert >myAddressBook.ABA file to myAddressBook.CSV file for which I already >have a script to extract contact info from. Do I have to write a >conduit to perform iethrer one of those, can a conduit be a standalone >without the need for a device to interact with, or is there >some thing else? Thanks a lot in advance. Well, the Palm address book syncs into the Palm desktop folder as a .dat file, using the default Palm conduit, so you *could* either: 1. Write a windows application that parses the .dat address book file and transfers the data to your own .csv file, or 2. Write a conduit (a plugin for HotSync) that replaces the default conduit, and writes the address book out to a comma delimited file. The first requires really no Palm OS knowledge, just Windows programming ability. The second is a niftier solution, since you don't need any go-between utility to convert the file (which can be bad, too, since it will take control of the address book conduit, thus causing other third party apps that utilize that conduit to have serious problems). The conduit can be a completely standalone solution, since there's already an interface there on the Palm (address book). However, you'll have to study the address book source code and conduit sources to understand how to do this, which means you'll have to learn the Palm OS API's to some degree. There are yet slicker ways to do this, some programmers have used the NetworkSync or ScoutSync to ftp things like the calandar and address book directly to the web. Obviously, this requires a bit more knowhow. I think there may be some examples of this out there, though...you'll just have to look around. -Rus -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
