dreamy has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a nice time management system running, i wrote on my own, since i and some of my collegues own a palm handheld i am about to find out how to implement an export for Palm.

Would be glad to hear from someone that it really worked .-)
  • Comment on Experience with exporting calendar data to Palm/PDA

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Re: Experience with exporting calendar data to Palm/PDA
by hacker (Priest) on Aug 12, 2002 at 07:29 UTC

    Funny you should ask... since I'm the maintainer of the exact code you'll need for that task, called pilot-link, which comes complete with Perl bindings that will allow you to access your DatebookDB entries directly.

    If you'd like to whip up some functional perl scripts that can be used to export/import Datebook entries, and contribute them to the project, I'll roll them into a future release. I've already done 4 releases of pilot-link this month, and expect to do another in two weeks.

    The core bindings are there (for Python, Tcl, and Java as well as the standard C and C++ code for the libraries and conduits), you just have to wrap them around the bits you want. Basically it would look something like this:

    use strict; use PDA::Pilot; use Data::Dumper; my ($port, # device port $db, # database to dump $socket, # socket descriptor $app, # AppInfo block $dlp, # sd = pilot_connect(port); $ui, # dlp_ReadUserInfo $info, # dlp_ReadOpenDBInfo $rec); # record count $socket = PDA::Pilot::openPort($port) or die "$!"; $db = $dlp->open("DatebookDB") or die "$!"; if ($db) { print "-"x40, "\n"; print "Dumping DatebookDB\n"; print "-"x40, "\n"; print "db class is ", ref $db, "\n"; # $rec = $db->getRecord(0); # print "Contents: ", Dumper($rec); my $app = $db->getAppBlock; # Dump all records to STDOUT # print Dumper($app); print "Categories: @{$app->{categoryName}}\n"; $db->close(); }
      Hey that's cool hacker I didnt realise you can communicate interactivly with a palm. I guess using that technique one could build a palm "filesystem" of sorts...
Re: Experience with exporting calendar data to Palm/PDA
by Ryszard (Priest) on Aug 12, 2002 at 07:17 UTC
    Working with palm files is really quite easy, once you understand the record structure.

    I've done pretty much what i *think* you are doing, ie porting my palm information to an RDBMS.

    Unfort I dont have any code handy, but checkout this node for more info.