628789 - CSV import is broken

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Calendar :: Import and Export, defect)

Description

[Nicolai Ehemann]

User-Agent:       Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.00
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101207 Lightning/1.0b2 Mnenhy/0.8.3 Thunderbird/3.1.7

CSV import is broken. If csv file does not fit exactly the correct format, import fails silently. Error console is also empty.
This happens for hand generated csv files in ANSI file format (converting to utf-8) solves this problem), but also for csv files generated by the export function.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Thunderbird with a new profile.
2. Install Lightning, restart
3. Go to calendar, add an event.
4. Export calendar to csv.
5. Delete the event.
6. Import the csv.
Actual Results:  
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Expected Results:  
At least an informative error message should appear. Better yet the import would work.

Comment 1

[Nicolai Ehemann]

The problem is known for years. It's even possible to find at least partial fixes for the import function.

Comment 2

[Felix Möller]

Where can these fixes be found Nicolai?

Comment 3

[Nicolai Ehemann]

I found some fix with this problem description here: http://www.sunbird-kalender.de/forum/viewtopic.php?p=8490#p8490. I didn't test for myself, and after looking into it (and the whole thread) again, I found it points to an other bug report (I didn't find this before submitting this report, although I searched for 'import') https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359083. It seems to fix other issues with the csv import/export. I'm not sure it is already integratetd into 1.0b2, but if so, it does not fix the problem I described above. Sorry I did not look so closely the first time.

Comment 4

[Julian Klein]

I can reproduce this with Seamonkey 2.10.1 and Lightning 1.5.2 under Ubuntu 12.4.
No CSV file is imported without any message at al. Neither a export from a (german) Outlook 97 nor a exportfrom the same Lighning version itself.

I think https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560036 is a duplicate of this bug.

Comment 5

[chukawahwah]

After I found the exact description of my problem in this bugreport I just googled "csv to ical" and the first hit was this online converter: http://manas.tungare.name/software/csv-to-ical/ from Manas Tungare (hope got the name correct) which I want to thank very much here.
If I would be a programmer I would contact Mr. Tungare and implement his converter into lightning. Unfortunately I am not but hope at least to help the community with my link here.

Comment 6

[chukawahwah]

After the mentioned workaround had problems with excel csv creation (" are not correct saved by excel (2010) -> workaround: saving csv as .prn and renaming in .csv) and problems with special charactersI I found another more comfortable solution:
http://www.sunbird-kalender.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=3220
Its a thread from the closed german lightning forum. There Flom (Florian Wilhelm) posted an excelfile with a macro which is converting a timetable into .ics format (german language).
It is working pretty good so far (Thanks to Flom, it is exactly what I was looking for!) Somehow I discovered problems with excel 2010. When there was another excel file opened beside Floms xlsm Copy Paste did not work. Until now I couldn't find out for what reason. For solutions I would be thankful. Probably this is already a known issue from microsoft...

Comment 7

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

The import/export code for Outlook CSV format has been removed in bug 1226851. Therefore resolving this bug report as WONTFIX.