#229 Error parsing contact: *Contact Name*. Please check if contact has some date fields (like birthday) with ill formed date.

[Fabian Meyertöns]

I downloaded GO Contact Sync Mod today and tried to sync my contacts from Google to Outlook when I encountered this error: Error Loading Google Contacts. Cannot connect to Google.
Please ensure you are connected to the internet. If you are behind a proxy, change your proxy configuration!
It also said: Error parsing contact: Contact Name. Please check if contact has some date fields (like birthday) with ill formed date.
It turned out, that the contact indeed had a date without a year because I only knew day and month of the date. After I added a year, the sync succeeded.
As Google Contacts doesn't have a problem with that kind of situation and I think this program also shouldn't abort the whole sync process because of a missing year in a date field.
I also think that the Cannot connect to Google error in this case is misleading.
(This could be seen as a feature request but I would personally classify it as a bug.)

[obelix30]

Unfortunately this is Google API that is not able to parse such contact (without year in birthday date), we cannot fix this on our side.

[Fabian Meyertöns]

The log file says that the error is in a function from the Google.GData.Client package.
I did a bit of research and it seems that the Google.GData.Client and Google.GData.Contacts packages aren't maintained since 2013 (according to nuget).
Could we drop support for these packages in favor of the new Google.Apis packages (like Google.Apis.PeopleService.v1)? I couldn't find the source code of the old APIs whereas the source for the new APIs is on github.
There I found that the schema for Dates explicitly allows partial dates like only day and month. (https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-dotnet-client/blob/ec03367bf3e5cc8bd98af47b3ffc8e85665ca0cc/DiscoveryJson/people_v1.json#L938-L939))
It was just an idea that this might resolve this issue.

[obelix30]

This will require to rewrite almost half of the application, I do not have capacity to do this.

And the newer library that contains PeopleService is also now not fully supported:
"This client library is supported but in maintenance mode only. We are fixing necessary bugs and adding essential features to ensure this library continues to meet your needs for accessing Google APIs. Non-critical issues will be closed. Any issue may be reopened if it is causing ongoing problems."

[obelix30]

And are you able to save Outlook contact with birthday date without a year?

[Fabian Meyertöns]

It was just an additional date and not the birthday, so I don't even need that to sync and I can't see that it did.

Just to add to your earlier reply, the FAQ of the library explains maintenance mode:

What does this library being in "maintenance mode" mean?
It means that the libraries in this repository are considered mature and complete; so we do not expect to add any more major features.
We will continue to support these libraries, fix bugs, and add minor features as required to support ongoing changes to the .NET platform.
We will continue to release new versions of all API libraries as they are available; and release new API libraries as new services become available.

I understand that there is no capacity at the moment but I think the library can safely be used.

[obelix30]

I will move this ticket to Feature Request

[obelix30]

Ticket moved from /p/googlesyncmod/support-requests/731/