Extension Update

Name of the extension

I haven’t figured out a name for the extension yet. I initially named it gcontacts, but that name already exists for several programs. gcontactsync is a potential name. Any suggestions are welcome.

SAXParseException

While syncing some newly-created cards, I encountered the following error:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the “&”; in the entity reference.

The cause was an oversight on my part during the conversion from an nsIAbCard to an XML representation of the contact. I had forgotten to replace special characters, such as &, <, >, ‘, and ” with &, <, >, ‘, and “, respectively. I was fortunate to catch this error before it caused any real problems. I also wrote a function to do the opposite when converting from XML to an nsIAbCard.

Code refactoring and reformatting

While browsing through the code, I realized that I had changed many of the functions and their parameter types without changing the name and the contents of some of the global variables had also changed, so I started refactoring the code. I am also reformatting the code.

lastModifiedDate/Address Book Listener

Since I added support for lastModifiedDate, I no longer need the address book listener.

HTTP Request

I didn’t like my previous HTTP Request methods, so made a few slight modifications. I currently have a generic method for sending an XMLHttpRequest with arguments for the type (POST, PUT, GET, DELETE), URL, body, header label(s)/value(s), and arrays of commands, as strings, to be evaluated depending on the response (OK, 0, or offline, and any error) since the XMLHttpRequest used is asynchronous. This flexibility allows me to call the same function for any HTTP Request that the program must send and act on the outcome.

More contacts supported

When a request is sent to Google for contacts, it only sends the first 25 by default. I now use the max-results query parameter to get the first 250 contacts. 250 was arbitrary, but having that many contacts to sync would probably take a long time. There is now a preference for the number of contacts supported by the extension.

Miscellaneous Improvements

I made a few miscellaneous improvements that resulted in a slight performance increase.  More global variables were removed as well.