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12.2 Import and Export Your Notes ↑

12.2.3 Import vCards

vCards are virtual contact cards used to store and exchange contact info for individuals and groups.

A vCard file is an ordinary text file formated according to the this IETF Specification.

A vCard file may contain one or more contact cards, and typically has a file extension of .vcf.

One way to create a vCard file is by exporting one or more contacts from the Apple Contacts app for the Mac.

Both the Apple Contacts app and the vCard spec provide for a lot of flexibility, and the intent behind Notenik’s support for this spec as an import option is not to provide a perfect translation of every possible field, but rather to provide something that is simpler but still useful.

The following table shows the support provided by Notenik for various field types.

vCard Parm Notenik Label Notes
ADR Address The vCard spec calls for a street address (or a delivery address) to be specified as a strict series of positional values, separated by semi-colons. It turns out that Apple Maps will accept these sorts of values with no problem, so Notenik will not attempt any reformatting of this field into a more conventional-looking value.
BDAY Birthday This will become a Date field type.
EMAIL Email See the note below for info on how multiple values will be handled.
FN Full Name This will be stored with a label of Full Name, but with the Title field type, and the Note’s file name will be based on this value.
N Name This will be stored with the Person field type.
NICKNAME Nickname This will be stored as an ordinary String.
NOTE Note/Body This will be stored as the body of the Note.
ORG Organization This will be stored as an ordinary String field.
TEL Phone This will be stored as a Phone field.
TITLE Job Title Another ordinary string.
URL Link This will become a clickable Link.
X-ABShowAs Kind If the input value is “COMPANY”, then this Pick From field will be set to “org”; otherwise it will be assumed to be an individual. This will become a Pick From field, with the following allowable values: family, individual, group, org.

Note that you may wish to use the Contacts starter pack to initialize your Collection before importing a vCard file, in which case the Title field will have a label of Full Name, and the Body field will have a label of Note. However use of this starter pack is not required.

When performing a vCard import, Notenik will unlock the Collection dictionary so that any missing fields may be added, to avoid data loss. So even if you start with Basic Notes, the import will add the needed field definitions.

Multiple Values

Note that both the Apple Contacts app and the vCard spec support multiple values for certain fields, such as ADR, EMAIL, TEL and URL.

When multiple values are found for one of these fields, on a single Note, then the Notenik import will handle these in the following ways, depending on the type of field.


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