Works great!

Changes have been made in Git (master):

commit 68e153f2b46789025d71db8f538d9f4d2d1ee37c
Author: Jan Schneider <jan@horde.org>
Date:   Fri Nov 23 15:21:26 2012 +0100

     [jan] Add free-text country attributes and use them in default 
Kolab backend (Request #11692).

  turba/config/attributes.php |   24 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
  turba/config/backends.php   |    8 ++++----
  turba/docs/CHANGES          |    2 ++
  turba/package.xml           |    2 ++
  4 files changed, 32 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

http://git.horde.org/horde-git/-/commit/68e153f2b46789025d71db8f538d9f4d2d1ee37c

Change 'country' to 'text' in attributes.php:

$attributes['homeCountry'] = array(
     'label' => _("Home Country"),
     'type' => 'text',
     'required' => false,
     'params' => array('prompt' => true)
);

In the long run the Kolab format would need to move this field to a 
reasonable standard. As Jan mentioned: everything else is a mess.

Not possible, because the country field is an enum. We may try harder 
to map to Turba values, if that's needed, but the output would always 
be what Turba know. This could be the country name, translated or not. 
The point is that this field is a technical field, not for direct 
human consumption, so using a translated country name makes absolutely 
no sense.

On my German Outlook installation, it uses German country names. Would 
be a bit strange to send a letter from Germany to f.e. Austria with an 
English country name on the envelope.

My primary goal is that horde doesn't trash user data if possible. So 
it would be nice to keep the free text somehow, may be prefixed with 
"Custom: "?

DE is at least a standard. Country names aren't. That aside, do the 
other clients at least always use the English country name?

Hi,

I'm currently testing the interoperability between Horde's Kolab 
implementation and other Kolab clients.

Kolab defines the "country" field just as a text field. Other clients 
(like Outlook) write out the full country name. Horde expects a 
country code, so it will hide/lose the country information.

Two ideas to solve this:
1. Do a country name lookup and try to match it to Horde's convention.
     "Germany" -> "DE".

2. Allow custom strings as with the "category" tag:
     Unknown categories from foreign Kolab clients just get imported.


Problem with the first idea is that another client won't be able read 
back Horde's country code.
So essentially, if the contact gets edited in Horde, the country 
information would change.
-> Probably only idea number two makes sense in the long run.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Thomas