Summary:

- is there any known way to automatically sync groups according to category settings?
- or at least, any known way to populate groups via drag&drop of selected entries?
- or, at the very least, any docu, examples, helpful sites on how to get and set the relevant data, methods etc to script my own way to that aim with qdbus-qt4 or whatever else is capable?


Context and details:

I used to store my calendars, contacts, tasks at Google and sync them from there to my android phone and thunderbird/lightning on different machines running linux or win*. For a number of reasons I decided to deGoogle my data habbits and have migrated to an ownCloud server.

Google contact has a rather easy to use way of grouping contacts, actually it's more like tagging the contacts to belong to a group. Android supports those groups out of the box. Thunderbird, with the help of an addon, syncs those contacts and automagically has a mail list for each of the groups defined in Google contacts. Ease of use and clarity for data handling, each contact has the info about which mail distribution list will apply directly as a property with itself. I like that.

OwnCloud, at least with the last few versions of it's 5er, does it more or less as well as Google does. The interface may not be that refined and handy, but the structures and functionality is there, which I appreciate a lot.
Syncing to android requires 2 apps (cardDav-sync and calDAV-sync) costing few € each and then everything works nicely like it ever did. Fun.

Syncing to Thunderbird's addressbook needs an addon which, unfortunately, is crippled in the way it handles mail lists. Categories are synced and recognized, I can even edit them conveniently. But there is no automatic and no decent manual way to build a mail list based on the categories of the synced contacts. There is a modal window that expects me to type email addresse in order to add them to the list. Type. No filter select, or at least drag and drop. Type.

This is the moment that I start to check Kontact again. Not the first time, KDE on arch is my main desktop for a year and it was KDE on debian before (less fun).
Connecting Kontact to ownCloud is very easy, actually comfortable. Syncing the contacts works smooth and fast, including the contact photos. KAddressbook shows me a flat list of names but there is a context menue which allows me to add fields for display and sorting. My pet property, Categories, is not included though.

Double click on a contact entry opens a editor dialog with a field for the categories, comfortable to select from a list of all existing values, if I decide to create a new one it is synced to ownCloud minutes later. Very nice indeed.

But try to create a group and populate it and there is a time tunnel back into the computational stone ages! There is a New Group dialog which is modal and no drag & drop is possible. Select a number of contacts, New Group -> the very same dialog, no 'selection awareness' and adding the selected entries to the new group. No!
The dialog expects me to type the name, at least offering an input-aware selection as I start to type. Seriously no fun!

So:
- is there any known way to automatically sync groups according to category settings?
- or at least, any known way to populate groups via drag&drop of selected entries?
- or, at the very least, any docu, examples, helpful sites on how to get and set the relevant data, methods etc to script my own way with qdbus-qt4 ?
I can
qdbus-qt4 org.kde.kaddressbook /kaddressbook/MainWindow_1 org.kde.KMainWindow.activateAction akonadi_contact_group_create
but i just opens the modal editor window and thus gets me nowhere.


Thanks in advance for any input!

Please file bugs regarding the modal dialog issue. It looks like an oversight that lingered in the code. As for the syncing, you can select different retrieval options for different addressbooks (IIRC there's not a real "group" setting in ownCloud, yet).