[Cole Schweikhardt]

Steven, we’ve recently discovered that vCards generated from the our attorney profiles have swapped the email marked as preferred (work) in Connections, the attorney’s, with that of their secretary’s email address (personal). Previously, they were applied properly with the attorney email being the first or preferred email. We’d tested them in both Windows Contacts, Outlook and Apple Contacts successfully.

Can you think of a reason this would happen? I don’t believe we’d any code changes to make it work before.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

There has not been a logic change to the email output for vCard in many years … infact there may not have ever been any changes since it was originally coded, after reviewing the change history.

Honestly the logic is pretty crude. I suspect the change is simply the order the email addresses were added to the entry. Try making sure the preferred email address is the first. When editing an entry you can drag and drop then in the order you want in the vCard.

I’d like to modernize the code a bit if you’re interested in testing. Let me know.

[Cole Schweikhardt]

Ok. Perhaps we had changed the preferred email from “personal” to “work” in the code ourselves for this client. Doing that solved the issue for us.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

I’m not sure we’re on the same page… when you say you changed the preferred email from personal to work, what do you mean? Do you mean the being the first option in the drop down? If so, that’s not actually the preferred, just the default which to the best of my memory has always been the person email.

When I mention order in my last reply, you can drag and drop the email field group to be in any order. For example, if you add two email addresses the first being work and the second being personal, you can drag and drop the personal to be the first. Being first does not make one or the other preferred. You need to select the “Preferred” option after adding your email addresses.

Now, that said, preferred has no being when creating the vCard, only the email type does, the personal one will always be written as the first email address followed by the work email address.

Anyway, sounds like you were able to correct the issue. Just to give you a heads up, I did decide to modernize my crude code which creates vCards so this might affect you and the files it creates.

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

I’ve made some great progress on this. I found what appears a very solid third party library for creating vCards. The files should be much more standards compliant (at least as vCard are concerned). There is a good chance this might affect your vCards and what you’ve come to expect when importing them. Hopefully it’ll be better.

If you send me a CSV export from the Connections : Tools admin page using the All tool, I can import it and compare the old vCard output vs the new to ensure this will not cause any regressions before releasing the update.

Hope to hear back!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

I’m releasing an update today which includes significant vCard enhancements. I tested with Windows Contact and Google Contacts. The new vCard now exports far more data in a format that is Google Contacts compatible. From what I’ve read, Google Contacts vCard Import was designed to play nice with contacts exported from Apple Contacts… so, the vCard should be better supported by Apple Contacts too.

[Cole Schweikhardt]

I’ll check these out Steven. In one site’s particular case, we use the Work email for the attorney and have used Personal for the attorney’s secretary. Attorneys are hot on vcards. They worry about the hierarchy of information. They want their email to show up first, be the one associated with their name. Contact apps handle them different way and label them differently. We found we needed to alter the order in which they occurred in the code to make the work mail the primary…maybe that is what is says in the code rather than preferred. However, I’m not sure if we tried some of the things you mentioned that may have made that easier. We’ll check it out again, as well as the new version. THanks!

[Steven Zahm]

@ Cole

Thanks for the feedback. In regards to the preferred email… the new code works like the old with one exception. The first email address regardless of the “Type” (selected from the dropdown) will be the preferred email. The order regardless of input can be controlled by drag and dropping the addresses to the preferred order. There is a radio for each email address entered to select it as the preferred. The exception in the new code, if the preferred radio is set that email will be marked as preferred in the vCard. This does affect Windows Contacts. I do not believe Google Contacts differentiates. So the order is more important (regardless of type). I do not know how Apple Contacts will handle it. I’d be interested in learning the results after your check it out.

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