Re: [coldsync-hackers] Category id numbers for AddressDB

[Andrew Arensburger <arensb+CShackers at ooblick dot com>]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 11:44:13PM -0400, Allan Neal wrote:
> Does anyone know if the Category ID # assigned in the appinfo block of
> AddressDB have any rhyme or reason to them or are they just random?

	I believe that by convention, category IDs in the range 1-128
are assgned on the Palm, and 129-255 are assigned on the desktop. Or
the other way around. You can create a new category on the Palm,
download the database with 'coldsync -mb . AddressDB', and examine the
category ID with 'pdbdump'.
	I'm not aware of any rules beyond that.

> I am trying to write an address book to Vcard conduit and would like to
> be able to create new categories when I get to the fetch part.

	Just be aware that syncing categories is decidedly nontrivial,
and that the reason ColdSync's built-in generic conduit doesn't do it
is that i came to the conclusion that it's not possible to do the
Right Thing in every circumstance (the general case is easy; it's the
exceptional cases that are hard).
	In particular, this means that the generic conduit will not
upload your new category to the Palm. You can write a Sync conduit
that'll do that (but expect it to fail in certain cases). You can then
have something like the following in your .coldsyncrc:

	# Convert vCards to Palm AddressDB, and vice-versa
	conduit Fetch, Dump {
		type: addr/DATA;
		path: /usr/local/libexec/palmVcard;
	}

	# Upload new categories after the Fetch conduit has run,
	# and download new ones from the Palm
	conduit Sync {
		type: addr/DATA;
		path: /usr/local/libexec/synccategories;
	}

	# After synccategories has run, sync the Address Book normally
	conduit Sync {
		type: addr/DATA;
		path: [generic];
	}

-- 
Andrew Arensburger                      This message *does* represent the
arensb@ooblick.com                      views of ooblick.com
		 Couldn't myself have better it said.

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