save contacts creation date

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SpaceSAM
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:39 pm

save contacts creation date

Post by SpaceSAM »

Chronlogical info often helps finding or sorting stuff, including contacts. But the date a contact was created does not seem to be recorded (either by DW or by the Google contacts API itself).

So : I think adding an option to save the current date when a contact is created would be really sweet.

I guess it would require some place to be stored in google contacts (a special tag in the "notes" field until Google decides to give it a dedicated field ?), but that seems otherwise a pretty straigtforward feature to add.

That would definitely make me happy I paid the pro App !
dwp
Site Admin
Posts: 713
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:46 pm

Re: save contacts creation date

Post by dwp »

Hello
Thanks for your advice, but some difficulties. DWC did not provide the contact editor. DWC does not know when to create a contact.
If time is saved to the memo field.
Will not be able to use it to sort. This may have lost its value.
SpaceSAM
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:39 pm

Re: save contacts creation date

Post by SpaceSAM »

dwp wrote:Hello
Thanks for your advice, but some difficulties. DWC did not provide the contact editor. DWC does not know when to create a contact.
Really ? Adding a contact in DWC (by hitting '+' at the top of the contacts screen, for isntance) is not handled by DWC at all ?
If time is saved to the memo field.
Will not be able to use it to sort. This may have lost its value.
It would lose some of its value, but still be useful for other uses (like, cleaning up your contacts, it would be easier if I could know the date I added a contact named "temp", or "John", in order to have any chance to remember exactly who it is.

And any way, having date saved within a generic field like memo means it's harder to sort by it, not impossible. I understand true sorting would require specific code, that would be slow because done in java in the app rather than thru a query executed fast by the database API.

But It could be done by some kind of hack : save date 20012-07-18 by inserting "zzz2012-07-18" at the beginning of the memo field, and a plain (Z-to-A) sort on that field would indeed yield most recent contacts first (and possibly a few others that happen to have memo fields starting with "zzz" but I doubt that would happen often enough to be a problem...). Actually maybe another character is sorted later than Z (like 9, or $, or whatever), but you get the idea, you just need to use the last character as a prefix.

That quick and ugly hack would be very satisfactory !
dwp
Site Admin
Posts: 713
Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2010 4:46 pm

Re: save contacts creation date

Post by dwp »

When you click the "+". DWC just call the system API to create a contact.
DWC can get feedback of the system who has been created.
Then add the schedule to the notes.

But if you create a contact by other means. DWC will not be able to get feedback.

When the date added to the notes. Sort it will be very slow. At the same time it does not work in the current contact list. We need a dedicated interface to display them. This will have a lot of work to do.

We may need an easier way. May use a custom field.

If you create a contact is a temporary contact. Maybe you can enter them a special name. Or added to a specific group.
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