1797091 - CSV export of address book silently drops all multiple field entries (e.g. 3rd email address etc.) which don't fit the old AB scheme

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Cunning! CSV export of an address book silently drops just certain multi-value field entries of your contact data, and you may never notice... (seen on 102.4.0 (64-bit), Win10).

STR

1. Have some contacts in a (local) address book with more than two values for a field, e.g. 3 email addresses, third one may be [e-mail].
2. Right-click on the (local) AB, select Export..., and save as my-ab.csv.
3. Inspect my-ab.csv file with text editor and search for [e-mail].

Actual

• [e-mail] is not found in the csv file, which probably means that:
• All multiple field values which don't fit into the old AB scheme have been lost in the csv file.
• If we dig hard enough, we might find more fails.

Expected

• Don't silently lose data on export. Wanting AB data as csv is a perfectly valid and useful scenario. Should be possible to create more numbered column headers for the first row like email3, email4 etc. Although this would require parsing all such multi-value data of all contacts before the export to know how many commas we need to fill for the others. Hmmm.
• Warn the user against such dataloss if we cannot or until we do better.

Comment 1

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Even though bug 1331246 was filed against the old AB, much of that might still apply, so we should check that, too.

Comment 2

[John Crisp]

Frustratingly still present on v115

It also means I do not know how to construct a CSV file for import if I have more than two email addresses?

That's even worse.