CardDAV Address Book entries not included?

[editorialcollective]

I've recently upgraded to Snow Leopard. One of the neat features of the newer version of Address Book is the ability to connect it to a CardDAV server, so that you can store contacts on a server, rather than locally on a specific machine (Address Book can also connect to an LDAP server, and Exchange 2007 servers). This feature is useful in my environment (we use Zimbra for mail/calenders/contacts, and it offers a CardDAV interface for contacts) so I spent quite a bit of time moving to CardDAV-based contacts.

However I was disappointed to discover that DVDPedia does not seem to know about these contacts: so when I want to mark an entry as Borrowed, and start typing the borrower's name, I no longer get offered matching entries from Address Book.

Is there any chance that a future revision of the Pedias will be able to handle CardDAV-based (and LDAP-based etc) contacts from Address Book?

[Conor]

We use an Apple API to get the contacts from the Address Book. If CardDAV contacts are not coming in I'll report it on to the Apple bug reporter. We have a way to limit the number of contacts that get used for the autofill in DVDpedia by creating a "Pedia" group in your Address Book. Try creating such a group and adding a few CardDAV contacts and restarting DVDpedia. Could be be that by asking specifically for the members of a group it works around the bug.

[editorialcollective]

I tried your suggestion of creating a "Pedia" group, but with the same results. If I create the group as a local group in Address Book, and add the CardDAV members to the local group, then Address Book makes duplicate (local) cards of the members -- which, of course, is not what I want (for the record the Pedias do present the duplicate local cards as options when I try to mark a DVD as borrowed). If I create the group as a CardDAV group, and add CardDAV members to that, no duplicates are made, and the Pedias still fail to present the members as options when marking a DVD as borrowed.

I suspect that this is a failing in the API: the new FaceTime beta application from Apple allows you to make FaceTime calls to iPhone 4 users; you select the call's recipient from your Address Book contacts. FaceTime beta also ignores my CardDAV contacts from Address Book, so the Pedias are not alone. Hopefully Apple will correct this with a later system update (preferably *before* the release of Lion...)

[Conor]

Thank you for the extra information, I wanted verification of what I saw in testing so that I can have a more detailed report for Apple. Because the fix involves changes to the behavior of a public API, it's doubtful that it will be implemented before Lion. Although I agree that most applications expect to get the external contacts as well when asking for all the "people" in the address book. Interesting that it's a failing in FaceTime as well, first party software tend to use newer methods that are ahead of the those available to third parties.