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Address Book stops indexing after editing Notes field w/ Applescript?
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Address Book stops indexing after editing Notes field w/ Applescript?


  • Subject: Address Book stops indexing after editing Notes field w/ Applescript?
  • From: spamstop <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:49:05 -0700

I've been playing around with address book all week, and have run into a wall. I suspect that the root cause is a bug in address book, but I'd love to know if anyone else has had similiar problems.

I use Now Up To Date and Contact currently, but wanted to move over to address book. The iSync interface doesn't move over some metadata for contacts (NU2DAC's "Notes" fields), but NU2DAC will export those fields to text files.

I've exported all of my contacts into text files, and imported them into addressbook. This alone works okay, except that all of the Note fields in address book (made up of the individual text-like Notes fields from NU2DAC) have little paragraph marker chars rather than the newlines that NU2DAC uses. Specifically, NU2DAC exports the Notes fields as text, with the unsigned char 0xA6 as the line separator (paragraph marker).

My first attempt to fix this involved writing a little applescript to replace the paragraph character with applescript's return. After running 'save addressbook', though, addressbook stops being able to index any entries whose notes are modified by the applescript.

Just for kicks, I restored the database, and ran an applescript that looped through every person, and only "set note of thisperson to note of thisperson", and then "save addressbook". Lo and behold, any contact that had a "Note" field suddenly became un-indexable.

After playing around with Address Book's SQLite database, it seems that using applescript to update the Note field causes the ZSTRINGFORINDEXING string of ZCONTACTINDEX to become NULL for the modified contacts. It's VERY possible that this is conditional on some other funky text in the Note field (maybe that paragraph character), though it seems unlikely.

Has anyone used applescript to modify the Note property of a person before? Can you still use Address Book to search for such contacts? Some of the Note fields I use are pretty large, perhaps this messes with AddressBook?

Any guidance is appreciated, at this point I'm looking at abandoning AddressBook altogether, as it's really unacceptable to have it stop indexing contacts that I need to find to conduct business. :-/

Thanks!
Jeremy
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