296331 - importing Palm tab-delimited export file inserts email address instead of first/last name

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: Address Book, defect)

Description

[Alfred Tom]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

I'm importing my address book from Palm into Thunderbird address book.   Instead
of importing "first name" and "last name" into the thunderbird's "name" field,
it imports the email address, which in Palm is a type of phone number.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Use Palm Desktop to create a few address records, including
2.  "select all" and export to tab-delimited text file (.txt)
3.  import into Thunderbird address book 
4.  Rearrange the fields ("move up" and "move down") so that first name lines up
with first name, last name lines up with last name, and email lines up with
email (actually, it doesn't matter what email lines up with, as you shall see).
5.  finish the import


Actual Results:  
look at the newly created address book.  Instead of displaying the name for each
record, it instead inserts the text in the email field.

Expected Results:  
It should have imported the first and last name into the name field.  I suspect
that the import routine is importing the email field into the name field instead
of the first and last name.  Should be a simple fix.

Comment 1

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Reporter, please can you attach an example file from a palm that exhibits this 
behaviour so we can test easily. Unfortunately, not all of us developers have 
one ;-)

Comment 2

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

David, would you be able to try this? otherwise I'll mark as invalid, as no
response from the reporter for an example file.

Comment 3

[Alfred Tom]

Sorry.  Haven't had time to do this.  If you can't try it, keep this bug open
and I'll try to get time.  I'd rather not send my whole address book...

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to comment #0)
> I'm importing my address book from Palm into Thunderbird address book.   Instead
> of importing "first name" and "last name" into the thunderbird's "name" field,
> it imports the email address

Alfred,

Palm Desktop doesn't export a display name. And TB doesn't construct one (bug
97294). I'm going to assume the main point of your bug is the last sentence...

If you didn't assign displayname (i.e. it was unchecked) then you wouldn't get
one in the TB address book then this is a dup of bug 97294 (and you might want
to vote for bug 97294).

If OTOH you assigned displayname to a field during import then that's what you
should have got - it works for me.  If this is the case and you have no
supporting information this will be marked invalid.  See attached sample tab
delimited file and screen shot.

Your thoughts on the above?

(also, in future, please cite your version of TB from help>about - the firefox
build id string is not useful here)

Comment 5

[Alfred Tom]

Let me try it again with a newer version of Palm Desktop and get back to you. 
BTW- Palm OS looks like it's dying (hopefully a Linux version will pull through,
but the format will probably be different).  If we support SyncML, will this
cover more bases?

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> BTW- Palm OS looks like it's dying (hopefully a Linux version will pull through,
> but the format will probably be different).  If we support SyncML, will this
> cover more bases?

We're currently beginning to look at various sync options, so we can't say either way at the moment.

> Let me try it again with a newer version of Palm Desktop and get back to you. 

Alfred, that comment was over 2 months ago - therefore I'm closing this as invalid as we've got no data to help your problem. However, if you do get round to looking at it again, please feel free to reopen this bug adding example files/replying to our previous comments at the same time.