119946 - LDIF export & import not handling modifytimestamp attribute

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: LDAP Integration, defect)

Description

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

LDIF import not handling modifytimestamp attribute

the code for this would go into

mozilla\mailnews\import\text\src\nsTextAddress.cpp

and, since we are duplicating code (grr) addrbook/src/nsAddressBook.cpp

when we fix this, we should inspect modifytimestamp from export, import and 
into the mab.  I have a feeling that other aspects will be broken, like I bet 
we never update the value when we modify the card.  so if you export to ldif, 
the value will always be zero.

perhaps there's also a way to use this attribute to improve how we do LRU in 
the collected addressbook.  (we do LRU to determine what are the oldest cards 
to remove when we hit the max).  the way we do it now is pretty broken.

Comment 1

[teal]

Yes, please inspect modifytimestamp from export. I received several LDIF which 
were exportet from Mozilla, but can't import them (into TheBat!) because of the 
invalid modifytimestamp.
Please have a look at http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3339.html and give a correct 
value. Thank you very much.

Comment 2

[David Gilmour]

It is now April 2006, over four years since this bug was first reported, and it is still causing problems.  It took quite a while to track down the reason why an LDIF export of a Thunderbird 1.5 address book cannot be imported into The Bat!, without manually stripping the invalid "modifytimestamp attribute" from the LDIF file.

Comment 3

[vitalie vrabie]

don't worry, David. TheBat! does sanity check of the imported LDIF data from now on.

just two things have to be of concern:

1. this will obviously bloat the users' EXCEPT.LOG,

2. LDIF is basically a replication log of an LD database. even from Mozilla's perspective alone, how logical is it to write there any data that isn't at all ever modified?

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

related to bug 358696 ?

Comment 5

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Should we change the product from Seamonkey to Thunderbird to get more attention?

Comment 6

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

I find there're actually two problems:
1. newly created contacts all have 0 for this attribute
2. modified contacts have values which are not formatted as date and time

Personally, I think the problem seen by the original reporter was that this attribute is always zero (problem #1), but some time in the past, that "bug" was fixed but turned to problem #2.

My personal address book was created more than 8 years ago.  When I do an export, a lot of my contacts have modifytimestamp 0.  On the other hand, the value assigned by Thunderbird seems to be a sequence number instead of a timestamp.

IMO, there're many things needed to be done about this:
1. A sequencenumber attribute should be created to hold the value assigned to modifytimestamp
2. Newly created contact should have a valid modifytimestamp value instead of zero

Comment 7

[石庭豐 (Seak, Teng-Fong)]

Since the wrong modifytimestamp value in LDIF file comes initially from badly exported ldif, I would suggest changing this bug's summary to include the word "export".  Objection?

(In reply to comment #4)
> related to bug 358696 ?
Yes, agree.  But should it be a dup, depend or block?  I'd say to be a "depend" because that bug is fixed, this bug is normally fixed.  Any objection?

Comment 8

[nemo]

With Thunderbird 12, export seems to be fine. However, when I import the exported file, modifytimestamp gets reset to 0. (I think this worked in version 10 or 11...)