manipulate Evolution, KCalExtended/mkcal, QtContacts PIM items via uniform command line#
The current development version of SyncEvolution, the one which will become 1.1, has some new features which may be useful for command line aficionados like myself: query and manipulate items in the databases that can be accessed with SyncEvolution backends. This is particularly useful for the new PIM storages in MeeGo, QtContacts and mkcal (formerly known as KCalExtended). Both are part of MeeGo Core, but come without any kind of frontend in Core. SyncEvolution provides a uniform way of testing these new storages using the command line or scripts.
Installation#
In MeeGo, make sure that at least 1.0.99.5 rpms (required for mkcal) or better, 1.0.99.6 (for QtContacts) get installed. The core “syncevolution” rpm is needed plus “syncevolution-kcalextended” resp. “syncevolution-qtcontacts”. When compiling from source, check out the master branch of [“syncevolution”](http://meego.gitorious.org/meego-middleware/syncevolution) and [“libsynthesis”](http://meego.gitorious.org/meego-middleware/libsynthesis) and follow the instructions in the “HACKING” document. Add –enable-kcalextended resp. –enable-qtcontacts as needed…
HOWTO#
These examples illustrate how to use the new options in combination with mkcal. In 1.0.99.6, “mkcal” can be used as type instead of “kcalextended”, as in the examples below. Only events are supported at the moment, todos and journal entries in the calendar are ignored. Wipe out calendar data the hard way:
rm -f ~/.calendardb* Import an event:
$ cat >/tmp/example.ics <<EOF BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//Ximian//NONSGML Evolution Calendar//EN VERSION:2.0 METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART:20100823T170000 DTEND:20100823T173000 SUMMARY:first event CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR EOF
$ syncevolution --import /tmp/example.ics --source-property type=kcalextended @foo bar #0: 3f630f1d-8009-4465-907b-3ec28248b90b-rid [ERROR] stderr: kdedate/ksystemtimezone.cpp: 313 - cannot get wall_clock_info (localzone) - QDBusError("org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown", "The name com.nokia.time was not provided by any .service files")
Because many of these system libraries don’t expect to be used by command line users, they spew out a lot of debugging information. The SyncEvolution command line filters this output and suppresses most of it. Developers who *want* to see it, can set the SYNCEVOLUTION_DEBUG environment variable to 1. They should also add *–daemon=no* to run the operation inside the “syncevolution” process instead of the “syncevo-dbus-server”. The error in this case is [MeeGo bug](http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6174 “timed not started”), which I’ll strip from the output of the following examples. The command line above works without any “@foo” configuration and “bar” data source, because the source type is specified explicitly. Configuring this value permanently makes the command line shorter:
$ syncevolution --configure --source-property type=kcalextended @default calendar List all events:
$ syncevolution --daemon=no --print-items @default calendar 3f630f1d-8009-4465-907b-3ec28248b90b-rid: first event Export events to stdout:
$ syncevolution --export - @default calendar BEGIN:VCALENDAR PRODID:-//K Desktop Environment//NONSGML libkcal 4.3//EN VERSION:2.0 BEGIN:VEVENT CREATED:20100901T131100Z DTSTAMP:20100901T130859Z UID:a62893e3-3df1-4a92-b57b-d05c805d4078 LAST-MODIFIED:20100901T131009Z SUMMARY:first event DTSTART:20100823T170000 DTEND:20100823T173000 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR Export one specific event into a file (like everything else, this also works for multiple events, writing into a single file or a directory):
$ syncevolution --export /tmp/exported.ics @default calendar 3f630f1d-8009-4465-907b-3ec28248b90b-rid
Update that event, showing of reading from stdin here:
$ perl -p -e 's/first event/first event modified/' /tmp/example.ics | syncevolution --daemon=no --update - @default calendar 3f630f1d-8009-4465-907b-3ec28248b90b-rid
#0: 3f630f1d-8009-4465-907b-3ec28248b90b-rid
$ syncevolution --daemon=no --export - @default calendar | grep SUMMARY
SUMMARY:first event
Hmm, that didn’t work as intended. Need to investigate… ah, I haven’t reimplemented that part with the new mkcal API yet. Will be fixed in 1.0.99.6. Delete the event:
$ syncevolution --delete-items @default calendar 3f630f1d-8009-4465-907b-3ec28248b90b-rid
[INFO] calendar: deleting "first event"
REFERENCE#
`
$ syncevolution –help
…
List items:
syncevolution –print-items
–export
Writes all items in the source or all items whose
The default delimiter are two newline characters for a blank line. This works for vCard 3.0 and iCalendar 2.0, which never contain blank lines. Because items may or may not end in a newline, as a special case the initial newline of a delimiter is skipped if the item ends in a newline.
–import Adds all items found in the directory or input file to the source. When reading from a directory, each file is treated as one item. Otherwise the input is split at the chosen delimiter. “none” as delimiter disables splitting of the input.
–update Overwrites the content of existing items. When updating from a directory, the name of each file is taken as its luid. When updating from file or stdin, the number of luids given on the command line must match with the number of items in the input.
–delete-items Removes the specified items from the source. Most backends print some progress information about this, but besides that, no further output is produced. Trying to remove an item which does not exist typically leads to an ERROR message, but is not reflected in a non-zero result of the command line invocation itself because the situation is not reported as an error by backends (removal of non-existent items is not an error in SyncML). `