Two empty contacts are displayed in Evolution and there is no way to delete them

[Jonas Schwabe]

If I open Evolution and switch to the adress book I have all the contacts I see at one.ubunu.com plus two contacts that are just blanc. I'll attach an image to illustrate that ;)
There is neither a way to delete these contacts nor to edit these, once tried Evolution reports:

Sind Sie sicher, dass Sie diesen Kontakt löschen wollen ()?
English:
Are you realy sure you want to delete ()?

If I hit delete I get this message:

Kontakt konnte nicht gelöscht werden
Anderer Fehler

Contact could not be deleted
Other error

Thanks in advance :)
Ubuntu One is an awesome piece of software!

[Sujith S (sujiths80)]

Can you try to delete the contact after you changing the address book from Ubuntuone to local ?

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

No success... Same problem :(

[jsribeiro (jsribeiro)]

Same here, on more than one computer. Reinstalled U1 from scratch, along with disk format, so as to make sure nothing is wrong with my acting.
Finally got files sync'ing, but contacts stay on the Cloud and refuse to come down to evolution. Two blank contacts appear, which can't be deleted or edited.

Browsing with futon shows two special records (something related to the design of the database?). Can these be the ones? Are they ok to delete? Has there been a corruption in U1's Cloud?

I mean, my contacts are in U1, but their of little use there...

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

For me they are syncing, everything is fine with that... Do you use Lucid or any older version of Ubuntu? Because the contact sync was just reactivated for Maverick but might not be for older systems... You maybe have to use proposed to test this (if it was not already published for everyone).
I just wanted to check out if there is something displayed in the couchdb webinterface but Firefox is not able to load the page.
Is file:///home/USERNAME/.local/share/desktop-couch/couchdb.html still the right URL? Because I just get "Connection failed".

[Samuele Pedroni (pedronis)]

judging from the output of converting the address book to vcard those empty entries likely correspond to design docs in the Couch DB used to store the contacts, evolution-couchdb should really filter those out in some places

[Rodrigo Moya (rodrigo-moya)]

Evolution-couchdb indeed filters the design documents, but initial releases didn't, so what version do you have of evolution-couchdb package?

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

I'm currently using mavericks package, I did all pending updates a few minutes ago so it should be a very recent version...

apt-cache show evolution-couchdb
Package: evolution-couchdb
Priority: optional
Section: gnome
Installed-Size: 128
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <email address hidden>
Original-Maintainer: Rodrigo Moya <email address hidden>
Architecture: i386
Version: 0.5.0-0ubuntu1
Depends: libart-2.0-2 (>= 2.3.18), libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.29.3), libc6 (>= 2.4), libcairo2 (>= 1.2.4), libcamel1.2-14 (>= 2.30.1), libcamel1.2-14 (<< 2.31), libcouchdb-glib-1.0-2, libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.0.2), libdbus-glib-1-2 (>= 0.78), libdesktopcouch-glib-1.0-2, libebook1.2-9 (>= 2.30.2), libedata-book1.2-2 (>= 2.30.2), libedataserver1.2-13 (>= 2.30.2), libenchant1c2a (>= 1.6), libevolution (>= 2.30.2), libfontconfig1 (>= 2.8.0), libfreetype6 (>= 2.2.1), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.31.1), libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (>= 2.21.6), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.16.0), libgnome-keyring0 (>= 2.20.3), libgnomecanvas2-0 (>= 2.11.1), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.8.0), libgtkhtml-editor0 (>= 1:3.30.2), libgtkhtml-editor0 (<< 1:3.31), libgtkhtml3.14-19 (>= 1:3.30.2), libgtkhtml3.14-19 (<< 1:3.31), libjson-glib-1.0-0, libnspr4-0d (>= 4.7.0~1.9b1), libnss3-1d (>= 3.12.2~rc1), libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.14.0), libsoup2.4-1 (>= 2.4.0), libsqlite3-0 (>= 3.7.0.1), libunique-1.0-0 (>= 1.0.0), libxml2 (>= 2.6.27), evolution (>= 2.27.0), desktopcouch
Filename: pool/main/e/evolution-couchdb/evolution-couchdb_0.5.0-0ubuntu1_i386.deb
Size: 28072
MD5sum: 5838d0e383f72a6f6f20567ad5430c2c
SHA1: 0ddbd16d41cf5fcbfacf797938971152460e58d6
SHA256: 2844cd53b507b8b8f7d4bfb789b44f0e5983268e1ee8a960bd42e8b96ae8b2f8
Description: Evolution support for CouchDB databases
 This package provides support for the Evolution mail and calendar program
 to access CouchDB databases (http://couchdb.apache.org), a replication and
 synchronization database of JSON documents, used by online services like
 UbuntuOne at http://ubuntuone.com
Homepage: https://launchpad.net/evolution-couchdb
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Origin: Ubuntu
Supported: 18m
Task: ubuntu-desktop, edubuntu-desktop

[David Southwood (ds-mailbag)]

I've been experiencing this problem (using fully patched Maverick). Tried deleting the local CouchDB contacts databases but the black lines would always reappear after evolution obtained the U1 contacts data.

From previous comments – is this really a bug in the way evolution filters the data? - are they likely to reappear?

I followed the wiki guide to reset CouchDB contacts completely - this has allowed me to copy the contacts back to U1 and now the blank lines have gone.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOne/ResetCouch

A couple of things to note:-

To get to the CouchDB web interface I needed to use the following command in a terminal (remember to replace USERNAME with your user name!) and then bookmark the page.

xdg-open file:///home/YOURUSERNAME/.local/share/desktop-couch/couchdb.html

I didn’t bother with the backup step since I already had the data locally.

Download the python script from the wiki and reset the U1 contacts database:-

python ubuntuone-couchdb-query --http-method=DELETE contacts

[jsribeiro (jsribeiro)]

@David S: Thank you for pointing me the python script.

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

OK... after doing that it got even more worse... All my contacts are deleted from one.ubuntu.com and they do not sync off again after adding them back locally... Maybe this will take a little longer, who knows :D
Also I'm no unable to edit my contacts trying that leads to the same message as it did before with the two empty contacts (they do not show off again).
I already restarted couchdb and several other processes to get access back but I actually stuck at this point -.- Any ideas on that?

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

OK, it seems this behavior was completely fixed after a while, now everything seems to be working.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-couchdb/+bug/666303/comments/9 worked great :) Tanks a lot!
Is there further investigation needed to fix this for other users not reading this report? Maybe server side?

[David Southwood (ds-mailbag)]

Ok, After working alright for some time after performing a complete reset of CouchDB the problem has reappeared - two blank lines have reappeared and any attempt to change things results in other error.

If I go to the CouchDB web interface and page to the end there are now two entries of this form:-

_design/u1_contact
_rev 2-71fa818750d46d1c2416a1e60fd6fc34
version 0.5
views

letter_buckets

    map
        function(doc) { if (doc.record_type == 'http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktopcouch/contact') { function first_let...
    reduce

        function(key, values, rereduce) {
        return sum(values);
        }

by_letter

    map
        function(doc) { if (doc.record_type == 'http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktopcouch/contact') { function first..."

As pointed out in :-
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-couchdb/+bug/666303/comments/6
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evolution-couchdb/+bug/666303/comments/7
...these appear to be design documents.

I'm running Maverick with all the latest patches.

Ran the backup sequence using the python script and these are definitely on the server as they come back into contacts-backup.json with the following command in a terminal.
python ubuntuone-couchdb-query contacts/_all_docs?include_docs=True > contacts-backup.json

These entries do not appear in the U1 web interface.

I've no doubt that if I performed a complete reset of CouchDB again these would disappear, but then I suspect they're only going to reappear once more (it went a while before they reappeared this time).

Whatever these entries are on the server once they appear in the local CouchDB instance they are NOT being filtered out by Evolution-couchdb.

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

Now they reappeared for me, too... Also I'm not able to sync contacts anymore thought, I waited for 2 days now after updating a contact locally...
+
I added a contact 3h ago and it was not synced for now.
BTW... I now have 3 empty contacts instead of 2...

[jsribeiro (jsribeiro)]

Same here...

[jsribeiro (jsribeiro)]

Bump.
Is anyone from U1 dev looking into this?
Can we help in any way?

[Joaquín Ignacio Aramendía (samsagax)]

Got the same problem. There was 2 contacts first, now there are 4 empty contacts and can't delete them.

[Jonas Schwabe (jonas-schwabe)]

I got a third item, too... it seems to increase for some reasons.
I will try to look into this to get some more details.

[Rodrigo Moya (rodrigo-moya)]

Again, this was due to the general brokenness of evolution-couchdb in natty, which is now fixed. So closing, please reopen if you see it again