Something very strange happened. After spending a great deal of time porting over my addressbook from Thunderbird (as a CSV import) and then meticulously adding three custom fields and their values to each and every contact, now, a few days later (not sure when exactly it happened) all those custom field names have been replaced by random-looking names (for example, "212edf91-366a-4109-8aa2-c8094ddf2ac3"), although the original field values were preserved.

So now I'm facing having to revisit every single contact (there are hundreds) and replace those random-looking field names with their original names, unless there is some way to automate this restoration. But I'm hesitant to put much time into it if the same thing is going to happen again, so I would like to know why it happened and how to prevent it in the future.

By the way, I'm running KDE version 4.10.2 under Kubuntu 13.04, with all available updates applied.

If you export the result as vcard or csv, do you have the same weirdness? Can you try to reproduce this with a new ,"bogus" (i.e. not containing personal information) contact? If so, you can file a bug to bugs.kde.org attaching the produced "gibberish" so that the developers can fix that.

When I export a contact as a vcard, the random-looking field names are exported. However, now, when I create a new contact and add custom fields, they remain as I created them. So I can't seem to reproduce the effect. So unless there is a way I can edit the data file which contains the contacts and do a global search and replace for these encoded field names, I will have to edit each contact via the Kontact user interface, which will take hours...

Contacts are stored natively in vCard format, if I recall correctly. They should be in ~/.local/share/contacts. Have a look and see if they're there.

einar wrote:Contacts are stored natively in vCard format, if I recall correctly. They should be in ~/.local/share/contacts. Have a look and see if they're there.

Thank you for the tip, but I tried editing one of those vCard files, but it had no effect on what was displayed in Kontact.

But do those vcard files have the strange fields? Do the changes also not occur after a logout / login?

einar wrote:But do those vcard files have the strange fields? Do the changes also not occur after a logout / login?

Yes, they do have the strange fields, and no, my changes do not seem to take effect after a logout/login.

I pinged the KDE PIM developers about this issue. I'll let you know if I find something.

einar wrote:I pinged the KDE PIM developers about this issue. I'll let you know if I find something.

Ok, thank you! I've done all the work manually to reset all the custom field names, and I'm hoping the switch won't happen again. It's a bit unsettling...