Address Book bugs
Address Book bugs
- Subject: Address Book bugs
- From: Paul Berkowitz <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 10:15:12 -0700
When you try to get a person's property that hasn't been set, it's not "",
it's +undefined;: this doesn't error, but errors in the next statement if
you've set a variable to it. If, however you ask for the 'properties'
property (of the person, or of any of its elements such as an address), the
empty properties are each listed as 'missing value', which is easier to work
with: it ought to be the same when just asking for the specific property.
'name', however is "", if empty. OK. When creating a new person by
AppleScript, if you only specify the properties for which you have real
values, the other properties all remain undefined, and you can edit them in
the UI later as usual, script them later, or whatever. Fine.
Now: what happens when you want to set a particular property to empty after
it has been given a value, whether in the UI or by script? Try, for example,
to remove the value for 'street' of an existing address.
1) If you set it to "". it looks correct in the person's card in AB, but is
now completely uneditable in the UI. This is terrible. The field is totally
unselectable. (Fortunately, this is _not_ the case for the very few
properties of the person itself. If you set 'organization' to "", it is
still editable afterwards in the UI: the word "Company" shows up dimmed
again, as with a new person.)
2) If you try to set it to 'missing value', it doesn't error, but you then
can't 'save addressbook'; you get an NSError and have to force-quit AB. No
good.
3) The only way to really get it to look like it does if you simply delete
the street value in the UI is to delete the address and create another one
with new values, omitting any mention of street. This is really not very
good.
4) I discovered that if you set street to 'null', the field becomes
editable. Oddly the word "Street" does not show up dimmed as it should, but
just as if I had set the actual value to "Street". And then you're stuck:
you can't select any other person in AB and have to quit again (force-quit
not required). So this is not an option either.
Since you can set a person 'organization' or 'job title' or 'first name' to
"" without making them uneditable, I have to assume the not being able to do
this for address properties is a bug. Or does anyone know any way other than
deleting an address and remaking it to effect this?
May I ask why Address Book couldn't have been a normal application where all
fields are just set to "" by default?
--
Paul Berkowitz
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