Tech Forum

While the Unit List on the Run, does seem to work if you select the right options, I got a runtime error with my first attempt, the csv file on the second attempt is clean; however, it could be cleaner.

Field headings are not completely accurate pertaining to outlook ie Home Street 2 while it will import and display in some areas, really should be broken apart in the CSV to City, State and Zip and Imported as such as three separate fields. The main reason--certain PDA devices then might/are picky about where the data is at.

Children field doesn't even show up as a standard field in most Outlook screens, that's why I've always included it in the Notes section with returns to separate. Emails should be separate fields to reap better beneft of separation of data

So it's all in how you look at it, nice app to to not have to log in to the web and get the bulk of the data formatted etc, but I still see some need of clean up for how I and others have used. Working and teaching others how to manipulate to their needs in Excel should lend to better results.

That said sorry, I haven't had time to post my solution from previous post. . .very busy trying to launch a business. Try to get to it this weekend.

So the Ward Websites have a vCard download now (in case anyone in this thread was not aware of that yet). It is a pretty recent development.

However, I'm running into an issue that I would like to solve now...I would like to get the photos into the vCard export. Has anyone tried to do this?

Unfortunately, from a preliminary look at the exported .vcf file and the HTML sources of the various Membership Lists in LUWS ("with Photos", normal, etc.), there is no easy way to connect the photos to the vCard for each family. There is no ID that coorelates the two in a simple, straight-forward fashion. The only way I can think of is to parse the vcf for each family and try to also parse the HTML of each family to find a match. This parsing would be pretty involved and hairy, not to mention if they change the HTML output, the process would be broken.

Anyone else tried to deal with this or have any ideas on the subject? What about you Church developers, can you add an option to include the photo binary in the vCard?

This is what the added property in the vCard 2.1 specification should look like:

PHOTO;ENCODING=BASE64;TYPE=JPEG:/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD/2wBD...

As I investigated this for my own purposes I found that the windows mail client (used to be called outlook express) did support the vcard format fully and the contacts imported just fine with the one file. you could then use Outlook to pull in the contacts from the mail client. I'm not a big fan of having to do this multiple times, and I've made my bread and butter on Microsoft, but the Outlook vcard issue is ridiculous.

jshawut wrote:As I investigated this for my own purposes I found that the windows mail client (used to be called outlook express) did support the vcard format fully and the contacts imported just fine with the one file. you could then use Outlook to pull in the contacts from the mail client. I'm not a big fan of having to do this multiple times, and I've made my bread and butter on Microsoft, but the Outlook vcard issue is ridiculous.

Thank you, I didn't try the multiple vCards in one file thing with the Windows Mail client, I only tried it with the latest Outlook and figured they would use the same algorithm. However, I did import one vCard into Windows Mail (just to get it into Windows Contacts) and the embedded image did not come through with it.

mkmurray wrote:My efforts are going up in flames quickly. This is not an easy task.......

If you can at least connect the photos to the vCards (or even just put the same UID property from the vCards into the Membership Directory HTML, maybe like the "id" of the table containing the family or something), then I could continue and build something to auto import these vCards into Outlook with their photos attached to them.

Can I emphasise and support this point too. Having ID's exposed for any records (families, individuals etc) would be a HUGE benefit for those of us who wish to write some added utilities to support the church's existing applications.

I have my "palm desktop" set to PC overwriters handheld in the sync preference for addresses. Then I delete all the addresses in my MLS Family Group before importing the MLS exported file. The next time I sync it removes all addresses that are not in the fresh download.

gdbrown wrote:I have my "palm desktop" set to PC overwriters handheld in the sync preference for addresses. Then I delete all the addresses in my MLS Family Group before importing the MLS exported file. The next time I sync it removes all addresses that are not in the fresh download.

While it can be confusing who have moved away and who is currently in the ward, I have found it helpful to have those older entries hang around for a little while. It has helped a few times as a Membership Clerk.

For most people, however, I can see how they really only benefit from the current list of members.

I have moved the posts about my project I am working on to get photos linked to the vCard exports. The new location is here:

http://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2151