Re: [Opensync-users] Some thoughts about Sync of Psion & Symbian

[Armin B. <arm...@de...>]

Joachim Laier wrote:
> Hi,

Hi!

> 
> a few weeks / months ago I stared to write a sync application to sync 
> Psion PDAs and Symbian based phones with KOrganizer.
> Now that I have a first shot ready for public testing I found out about 
> OpenSync. I realised that OpenSync is a nice framework for the task I 
> wanted to achieve and it's probably much more stable and feature rich 
> at this time than my programs will ever be.
> 
> So I thought it'd be better to halt my development and try to get a 
> Psion/Symbian plugin ready. I know there's a lot of work for SyncML 
> which is supported on some Symbian phones but Psion does not support 
> SyncML.
> 
> As the file format of the Psion/Symbian Applications is not publically 
> known and may change in the future, programmers are supposed to access 
> the data files through the APIs provided by Symbian.
> 
> From what I found out so far it should't be hard to write a 
> client-server application, where the Psion application communicates 
> with the plugin to transfer the data.

Thats correct. opensync has support for "server" plugins that listen to
incoming connection from devices and notify the sync engine about this.

> 
> The Symbian-API provides import and export of vCalendar-Files (Version 
> 1.0); however it seems to be pretty buggy. Time values are pretty messy 
> and reptetitions and alarms seem to be faulty.
> As I don't know much about the vCalendar file format I would prefer to 
> convert the data to the XML-format used by OpenSync as an interchange 
> format. However I haven't found any documentation on that format.

so do i understand you correctly that you dont want to use the symbian
api at all, and instead access the content directly?

how buggy are the generated vcal files? if they arent too buggy, another
 option would be to write an extension to the vcal format (like
"vcal-symbian") that can work around these bugs.

> 
> Is there some documentation on that XML-Format available? 

I didnt publish any documentation about this format yet for 2 reasons:
- at the moment opensync does not support merging of changes. but this
is a big thing on our todo list. to support merging, the xml format
probably has to be changed slightly to make the merging algorithm as
simple as possible. so i dont want to guarantee stablity of this
internal format at this point of time.
- i would like to provide a api for better handling of the xml format
(like searching for nodes, getting node content etc) that hides the
internal complexity of format.

> Is there a definition/list of attributes for Events, Todos, Contacts, 
> etc?

at the moment, your best bet is to ask me :) I will help you with
information about the internal xml format if this is ok.

> 
> Looking forward to get into coding. ;-)

very good :)

Regards,
Armin

> 
> Bye Jo
> 
> 
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