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Question

How can I access all contacts on a CommuniGate Pro Server?

Context

I need to migrate contacts from 70 email accounts stored on a Communigate Pro server. Since CommuniGate supports CardDAV, I decided to use this protocol rather than exporting the contacts manually from their web client, Pronto.

I have managed to access the CardDAV folders and to extract the vCards contained there. However, the problem is that not all of the contacts show up in CardDAV; in particular, the web client contains subgroups of contacts that are invisible in CardDAV.

When I export these subgroups from the web client, they are outputted as a txt file in a proprietary format called vCardGroup. Even though I wrote a PHP script to convert vCardGroup to vCard, using this method is still very slow.

I will be grateful if you suggest a way to extract these contact subgroups programmatically. I understand that CardDAV does not support subgroups, so I guess that the big question is: where are these txt files stored?

As a reference, please find here the result of a PROPFIND request on the root of the CardDAV folder. Note that CommuniGate seems to implement CardDAV via http://calendarserver.org.

Thank you for your attention!

coccoinomane
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    CardDAV itself does support subgroups (a member of a group can be any other vCard, including a group vCard), but many clients don't. Maybe that is the reason why the CommuniGate server doesn't expose those in its CardDAV interface. It's not an answer to your question though, maybe you should tag it as 'CommuniGate' instead of CardDAV - it really seems to be CG specific. – hnh Feb 02 '16 at 10:25
  • Thanks hnh for your response. Could you please suggest me a CardDAV client that supports this feature? P.S. I tried tagging the question as CommuniGate, but I couldn't because it takes 1000 reputation to create a new tag. – coccoinomane Feb 03 '16 at 16:04
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    I don't know which ones do, maybe none, but the vCard format supports that :-) It wouldn't really help your case anyways. What I was saying is that CGP might deliberately disable that feature to support clients which do not support nested groups and would likely just break (i.e. the most important ones: iOS and OSX). – hnh Feb 04 '16 at 14:04
  • Thanks hnh. In the meanwhile I have contacted Communigate support, and they told me that their CardDAV support is very basic. They suggested I use the XIMSS protocol. I will answer my own question; thank you for your help! – coccoinomane Feb 04 '16 at 15:56

1 Answers1

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After contacting the Communigate Pro (CGP) support team, I am able to answer my own question:

The only way to extract contacts programmatically from a Communigate Pro server is having root access to the server and use a protocol like XIMSS.

They also told me that CGP's support of CardDAV is limited, and does not include subgroups.

Since the server administrator is an evil man, I will have to extract the contacts manually using the web client, Pronto.

Just in case some poor soul is in my same situation, I provide a link to my script to convert the proprietary vGroupCard format (ie. BEGIN:VGROUP) to the standard vCard format (ie. BEGIN:VCARD).

coccoinomane
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