Tech Forum

I like the new lds site a lot. I love that calendaring will be much more up to date and have neat features such as being able to subscribe to ical, iphone, etc.

What I would love is to have the contact section (the ward directory) have a way to sync out to a computer or mobile device. It would be awesome to have something like CardDav. The ward directory is one thing that is constantly changing and it would be nice to have a way to have it up to date. But if that can't come anytime soon how about at least adding back in vCard exporting. The regular lds.org has that but the new.lds.org only has an excel export.

If the formatting is consistent enough, converting to vCard should be simple. Unfortunately I hit a snag because the address field is not structured. There is only a space between the street address and city - making it very difficult to parse automatically. So far the most reliable idea I have come across is using a geocoding service to parse the address; however, I'd have to do something to preserve apartment numbers - the geocoding services I've seen seem to all strip them.

What I'd really like to see is an XML structured like:
<household>
<familyname/>
<familyphone/>
<familyaddress>
<thoroughfare/>
<city/>
<region/>
<postcode/>
<country/>
</familyaddress>
<familymember class="headofhouse">
<name><given/><surname/></name>
<phone/>
<email/>
</familymember>
<familymember class="spouse">
<name><given/><surname/></name>
<phone/>
<email/>
</familymember>
<familymember>
<name><given/><surname/></name>
<phone/>
<email/>
</familymember>
</household>

Then one could easily make individual or family vCards depending on your needs. If I could parse the address, I'd be able to build this structure from the current csv. Adding UUID and ORG information contained in the current vCard format would be nice too. Wrapping all the households into a ward element and using a stake element as root would incorporate the org info nicely in a format that would be very useful for exporting the entire stake directory.

There is now a iPhone/iPad app (called LDS Tools, released yesterday) that lets you sync this same directory to your iOS device. Similar applications for Android, Blackberry, WebOS, and Windows Mobile are on the way.