In version 3 we introduced structured names and addresses along with the formatted versions, however at the moment we do not provide conversion from formatted to structured at our side. Moreover the behavior of Contact Manager in GMail is suboptimal, only the formatted version can be edited, and upon edit of the name or address field the structure is destroyed. We are working hard to improve the current behavior.
We are intend to introduce heuristic name and address parsing in the API, and to help developers to adjust to incoming improvements we recommend to follow a few simple rules while developing structured and/or formatted data aware clients: 1. Read the flavor (structured / formatted) the client is interested about. 2. If the data type (structured / formatted) your client is interested in is not available, then format or parse the other available data type for the application needs. 3. On modification explicitly clear the flavor the application doesn't need. In this case mutation will trigger heuristics to generate the missing flavor. 4. If the application provides both structured and formatted parts no heuristics will be applied and data will be stored as is. Please note that point 2 is a temporary solution until not all flavors are available in the database. As we intend to back-fill all existing contacts with the missing flavors using our heuristic parsers, this step will become obsolete in the future. Those contacts that already contain both flavors will remain unchanged. Our heuristic parser will be used by Contact Manager in GMail too, so if the user edits the formatted name or address in the contact manager, we will generate the correspondent structured components. And to answer your obvious question, when will it happen? As soon as we are convinced that our parsing algorithm is right. Please expect that the heuristic name parsing probably will come earlier than address parsing. Hope this answers lots of your questions and valuable comments about formatted vs. structured names and addresses posted to this group. Sincerely yours, Gyorgy Abonyi, Google Contacts team --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Contacts API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-contacts-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
