[address book] No import/export to/from files

[cm-t 🦄🏂🌈🎵]

Hi,

There are no option to sync contact for a human being form the Contacts apps, from a backup file (xml,vcf,…?). This need comes from that many users of Ubuntu might be moving from Android or other famous OS on phone; these OS not always give the option to sync contact on SIM, but on an file on the SDCARD, so Ubuntu (address-book-app) should provide a way to import these backups.

Steps :

 * Launch contacts
 * no option to sync, import/export contact are found on the interface (only a search option and a + option)
 * swipe from down to access the + menu, users might expect to add manually contact here, no more option like importing contacts from file.
 * To be sure I checked in the system settings, no import option found there

User should be able to add contact from his backup on SDCARD (no one want to import hundreds of contacts manually).

[cm-t 🦄🏂🌈🎵 (cm-t)]

HI,

Just for the record, I created the similar bug for SIM, file and account :

 * SIM : bug #1331346 ( No access to contacts on SIM )
 * file : ( this bug )
 * account : bug #1331351 ( contacts syncing is not enough intuitive )

Librement

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Robie Basak (racb)]

This might be better described as "No Import/export to/from files". I'd certainly like VCF import.

Workaround: see http://askubuntu.com/q/360466/7808

[Romain Fluttaz (botux)]

You can import with a vcf file from the terminal with syncevolution :

    syncevolution --import Documents/Contacts.vcf backend=evolution-contacts database=Personal

You can check your local database name with "syncevolution --print-databases" under the evolution-contacts section.

[Borim (borim)]

Thanks Romain for the workaround.

I am still hoping there will be app option for import/export the contacts.

[Renato Araujo Oliveira Filho (renatofilho)]

In fact you can export and import from vcf files. The code is already implemented in the App.

If you click on "share" button it will generate a vcard with this contact (or multiple contacts, if you are in multi selection mode).

The problem is that, we do not have a app that accept a vcard and save it to disk, or vice-versa.

We have two options here.

1 - Add a explicitly option on address-book-app to save/restore file to disk (which can be complicated since we will need to open a file dialog asking where to save/read it).
2 - Implement support for that on file manage. This will be very simple since we only need to receive it from content-hub and write it on disk. The sabe is valid if a user click on a vcard file it should use content-hub to import it to address-book.