I added a Contact in Rex, why hasn't it appeared on my device?
This could be for a few reasons (in order of likelihood)
- CardDAV is a syncing protocol. This means that updates do not appear immediately. Provided that your CardDAV client has been setup correctly, your Contact should appear on your device the next time the device syncs - how often this sync happens depends on your client.
- Your client has been configured to sync more than once every 15 minutes. If this is the case it may take up to 15 minutes before your Contact appears - we employ some caching to ensure the syncing service is available to all users.
- The Contact you created does not fit inside the parameters of your configured filter. Please check the filter on your Contact screen - you can click the blue number of matching Contacts to view the matching list in Rex.
- Your filter has exceeded the maximum of 5000 contacts.
What details are downloaded?
The following details are available for download:
- Names or company name
- Phone numbers
- Email addresses
- Birthday
Why do my Contacts appear split up?
In order to work more appropriately as an address book, we have elected to split individuals in a Contact record up into separate Contacts. For example, if you have a Contact listed as "John Adams and Mary Adams" in Rex, that Contact will appear as two separate entries in your address book (each with the same details). The first Contact would be John Adams and the second would be Mary Adams. Please note; these split Contacts do not count toward your 5000 limit.
Why can't I create new Contacts / Why do my updates to Contacts disappear?
During testing, we found that different CardDAV clients send information in different ways, despite the formats provided in the protocol. For example, sometimes not all phone numbers are sent back with a Contact. Unfortunately in this scenario it's impossible for us to tell if phone numbers were deliberately omitted (i.e. deleted by the user) and/or/if the client implementation simply does not allow for the extra data to be returned.
In addition, we noticed that some CardDAV clients behaved rather erratically sending hundreds of update commands event when no changes had occurred. This coupled with the above, would make any minor issue in a CardDAV client much more severe.
Both scenarios above left us open to the very real possibility of data loss. For this reason - and only after heavy testing - did we decide to make the CardDAV implementation read only.
Why can't I download more than 5000 Contacts?
We found that most devices and most address books started to become unwieldy, slow and sometimes unstable after this limit was reached. For this reason, we imposed a hard ceiling of 5000 Contacts (this was initially set at 100 during testing but we do understand that some users deal with fairly large bases of current Contacts at any given time). Additionally, please remember that the CardDAV interface has been designed as a supplemental interface to Rex to provide access to your most used current Contacts on the go. It should not be the core way that you access your Rex Contacts.
How do I choose which Contacts I want to sync to my device / application?
The filter (configurable from your user profile screen) has been added to ensure that you can select the Contacts that you'd like to sync. If you want to be more picky about which Contacts sync to your phone, we suggest configuring a tag filter and tagging any Contacts you'd like to come down with that filter.