I am new to Nextcloud and tried to import from my Mac os10.14/Mojave contacts (iCloud) to my Nextcloud.
I exported the contact from the Mac to vcf 3.0 and imported it to Nextcloud. But unfortunately in Nextcloud the data for the postal address or the names of relatives are not available anymore.
Did I do something wrong? And what can I change to have better results?
Did I overestimate the possibilities of NC or is it a (known) bug?
Is there already a topic answering this problem (I didn’t find it)
Create a new contact record from within the Nextcloud contacts app and fill in the desired data. Then export the newly created contact and a previously imported contact to a vcf file. If you compare both files you will most likely
see that the imported contact uses a different CardDAV field construct than the newly created one.
find the missing data in one of the exoprted files.
Afaik iOS/MaxOS devices are very often using a different CardDAV field contruct than the default one. Nextcloud doesn’t delete this data, so that you continue to sync it, but it might be possible that not all of them is displayed in the web gui.
Thanks for the explanation. I followed your suggestions and see the differences in the files.
The imported data are still there, but I cannot see them in the Web GUI? Mmmh. Okay, I see that they are still complete in the Contacts app of ios and osx.
The differenceces in the CardDav field construct make it more difficult to read/understand the UI of the contacts app of ios or osx.
I appreciate your support to understand the problem. And a next question arises: Do you know if there exists a tool to harmonize/ to transfer one field construct to another and to configure the field labels? Or to configure the Nextcloud contact app more appropriate to my needs?
It might be worth if you provide a side-by-side comparison of both records to get a better idea which fields in detail are not matching on your devices. Additionally we would be able to check if a problem has already been addressed in the Contacts app repository.
Nextcloud relies on the CardDAV standard definition and afaik no way exists to customize the Contacts app so that the iOS/MacOS fields are shown directly. In the Contacts app repository several issues exist which might be related to your problem.
attached you will find the two vcf files. The “original” is the export of Mac and the nc_card.vcf is the file I’ve got after I have imported the “original” to NC and then exported from there back to vcf.
The differences are visible. Which file closer to standard is, which not I cannot deceide.
My topic is that the data I import to NC is not accessible to me anymore (in the Web GUI) and the presentation in ios and MacOs is awful because the field labels are not interpreted correctly in the user interface.
Without any possibilities for finetuning/configuration in the NC contact app I have no good feeling in moving the data from icloud to NC.
Thank you very much for your support, which helps to understand the issue.
Yeah, with a small program the issue may be solved but without knowing the vcf standard I am not sure if the effort will bring results. Or if I will just go from one issue to the next.
Update 2020-11-25: I’ve learned that there are a lot of app to convert vcf files to Excel and back to vcf. This speeds up the process to migrate from icloud to nextcloud. However, the tools I’ve found were not perfect and a lot of manual work was necessary.
And I’ve learned the limits of the Nextcloud contact app, e.g. that it does not work smoothly to type in a birthday with the date picker
