Contacts / 'CardDAV server' / read-only

The Problem:
Currently, we have a user1 who updates all contact information for all users, and prints/emails out a spreadsheet report, to all staff of the updated contacts list/report.

The solution, Nextcloud (contacts) ?: :innocent:
The use case we are trying to achieve here is ‘one-way sync’ (read-only) with Nextcloud contacts.
Where a list of contacts is imported/updated/maintained to an ‘addressbook1’ and gets pushed to all endpoints accessing the CardDAV account and prevents endpoints from creating contacts back into the ‘addressbook1’.

Progress:
user1, logs in creates addressbook1.
user1, imports contacts into [created] addressbook1.

On endpoints/mobile devices (iPhone):
Settings > Contacts > Accounts > Add Account > Other > Add CardDAV account.

Access to addressbook1 and contacts is present, changes made on ‘addressbook1’ from Nextcloud GUI are pushed to all endpoints accessing the CardDAV account, but clients can edit/create contacts to back into the address book.

Nextcloud gods, send help!:pray:

UPDATE 3/14/23
one-way sync resolved.

-user1, creates and shares ‘addresbook1’ w/out edit permissions to ‘user2’
-user2 is added to all endpoints as a CardDAV account.

The best way to achive this functionality is, that one person owns the “to be shared” address book and that this person shares the address book without edit-rights with other users. I’m using this mechanism for years now and it works as expected.

Open Contacts app → select contact setting in the lower left corner → click on the share symbol behind the desired address book → share the address book but don’t tick the “allow editing” box.

Another suggestion I came across that did not qualify as a ‘one-way sync’ for us was to set the quota for ‘user1’ to ‘0 B’. Setting the ‘user1’ quota to ‘0 B’ allowed edits.

Thank you, your suggestion works as intended and allows for ‘one-way sync’ hope this helps anyone looking to achieve the same thing.

Might have missed something. But turns out this is no longer working for some reason.

so to recap.
-we have user1 sharing the address book to user2 (with no edit-rights).
-on the end clients/phones, we added the user2 account to push the address book to all staff, and yes, from the end clients/phones staff is not able to edits the existing contacts.

but we are noticing, end clients/phones when creating a NEW contact, from the end clients/phones, gets added to a different address book ‘contacts’ within the shared address book account. Which then gets pushed (2way sync) back to all users with access to the account/shared address book defeating the one-way sync.

Not sure how is this even happening, as for they only have access to the account that does not have the edit rights.

is there a way to prevent new contacts created on end clients/phones not to be added to the shared account/address book?

Still having same issues here, can someone please advise on what is allowing users to creat new contacts
into a shared address book, when the address book shared is shared without edit rights

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