Category or multi local addressbook support in contacts?

Software Phosh
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I have 15+ year old vcf file with several hundred contacts spread over about 10 categories. My experiments with mobian bookworm on a pinephone and extensive searching and reading the internet in general and this forum in particular imply that that the phosh contacts app does not support categories but does support multiple addressbooks. But I can’t tell if multiple local addressbooks will work. The UI doesn’t seem to provide for creating or opening them, but I wonder if it can be done via CLI to get started.

I know the current attitude is to “just search on a substring” but all my life I have frequently lost memory of a name that i haven’t thought of for a few months, even for frequent contacts. Sometimes when it pops into my head minutes or hours later, I forget it again in a few minutes. But I recognize it instantly when I see it. So, it is really important to me to be able to scroll through relatively small lists of contacts that have been filtered by category. I am pretty sure that the (linux) Sharp Zaurus from over 20 years ago supported categories.

(I keep coming across old references to syncevolution and librem5-goodies and slightly less old references saying that they have been moved from byzantium, but I haven’t tried to install them and anyway don’t think they would help with this particualr problem.)

So, is there anyway to do what I need on a Librem 5? I don’t want to set up any cloud based addressbooks.

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You can try posting about your issue on GNOME Discourse with the #contacts tag:

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I don’t have evolution on any of my computers because I can’t stand it. But I do know that it supports multiple local address lists and that address lists support categories, so I don’t think that it is an upstream problem.

I’ll try browsing for topics tagged contacts in the slim chance that CLI manipulation of contact lists is described, but I dread the hounding from Discourse to register an account.

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In the vCard file, do you know what property specifically is used to hold the “category”?

If CLI is considered an acceptable solution, surely it would be possible to write a quick and dirty script (bash? awk?) that, given a category, would just list the names from cards in that category.

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Here’s an awk hack for you.

Invoke as:

awk -v TARGET=yourcategory -f cat.awk <yourcontacts.vcf

where cat.awk contains

BEGIN { TARGET=toupper(TARGET); print "TARGET is " TARGET; print "" }
/^BEGIN:/ { fn=""; cat="" }
/^FN:/ { fn=$0; sub("FN:","",fn) }
/^CATEGORIES:/ { cat=toupper($0) }
/^END:/ { if ( index(cat,TARGET) != 0 && fn != "" ) { print fn } }

with the disclaimer that I have no CATEGORIES defined in my vCard file, hence the above has had very limited testing.

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Thank you for for the thoughts, effort (scripting, apparent research, and even testing) you have put into this.

I should have been more clear that I was looking for a way to manipulate the database or some other element so as to get category support and/or direct/indirect experience/knowledge of Phosh dialer SIP support.

I have since made a bit of progress on my own on a number of fronts. Current results/status follow.

Evolution:

It turns out evolution had been installed on my computer at work.

I imported the Vcards and was disappointed to find that the UI does not appear to support CATEGORIES, nor is there any column in any of the tables corresponding in any way to anything category like. But there is a blob column containing the entire imported Vcard for the contact.

Next, I looked into multiple local contact lists. They were easy enough to add, but under the hood, each gets put into its own .local/share/evolution/addressbook//contacts.db where is 40 characters long. I doubt that directory structure will work on a Phosh system if it is simply copied and I didn’t even try.

What I ended up doing for now as a not really satisfactory and hopefully temporary stopgap:

I appended the category to the FN: (full name) line, so I can search with any substring of a name or category and get a scrollable list of matches.

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No worries. It doesn’t take much effort to write 5 lines of awk and it might be useful for someone else.

I understood that you really wanted native support, in which case presumably the right approach is to make the changes to the Contacts application i.e. submit a patch. :wink:

Ideally the Contacts application would allow a couple of user-definable custom fields so that users can go off in their own directions with organising contacts but without having to make code changes.

Can you use the Notes field? (or what I assume is a free-text notes field at the very end)

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