[Evolution-users] Categories, Groups or Labels in Contacts

[rsbrux]

On Tue, 2025-11-04 at 16:13 +0100, Milan Crha via evolution-users
wrote:
> On Tue, 2025-11-04 at 15:14 +0100, rsbrux via evolution-users wrote:
> > This is possible with a more complete and up-to-
> > date implementation of CardDAV support, as found in CardBook.
> 
> 	Hi,
> do you have any specific pointer of what could be missing in the
> CardDAV support, please? The last time I tried, Google does not
> populate CATEGORY property of the vCard it passes over its CardDAV
> interface (in contrast to any other CardDAV servers, those real
> CardDAV
> servers), thus I guess the CardBook does not use CardDAV, or not only
> that, with the Google servers.
> 
> > are there plans to provide it in Evolution itself?
> 
> When the evolution-data-server used libgdata instead of the CardDAV,
> it
> was able to sync the Google groups into the contact categories, but
> since the libgdata's contacts support effectively died with
> deprecation
> of the Contacts API on the Google side, the evolution-data-server
> moved
> to the CardDAV, with its downsides. There is filled [1], to use the
> People API of the Google servers, but it requires someone to actually
> write the interface between the REST data and the vCard data.
> 
> If there is any easier way, then I'm all for it.
> 
> 	Thanks and bye,
> 	Milan
> 
> [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution-data-server/-/issues/516
> 
Sorry, I don't know enough about the inner workings of either CardBook
or Google Contacts. I just remember reading somewhere that CardBook
owed its ability to sync with Google's Groups/Labels to its complete
implementation of CardDAV 4. It's too bad that I don't remember the
source, but ISTR that it said the native Thunderbird support of CardDAV
was incomplete or not up to CardDAV 4 level. This seems weird because
Google's own docs only claim to support vCard 3.0, which already
includes categories.  Go figure!
Of course, you could always examine CardBook's code, since it's open
source, but judging by the traffic on this list, you have more
important issues to attend to. ;-)
Thanks for responding!