Lookup Strangeness -> "Reset PIM Sync Global Field Mapping" is the Fix

I recently discovered that our BlackBerry lookups were returning some bad information. Our addressing information was coming up wrong, in that the Home Address header was missing, replaced by a second Work Address header. Also, the information in the home address fields was limited just to city and country.

Here is what we were seeing (fields filled with dummy info for testing):


The last address is actually the two home address fields city and country, but labeled as a second Work Address. I had never seen this before, at least this was working properly a few months ago. We have a secondary BES infrastructure in the EU, totally separate, but alas this was occuring there too, which pointed to a Domino problem.

I assumed this must be due to some corruption or weird customization in the names.nsf, where the BES pulls this information from. However copying and pasting my person document into my test BES environment, then doing a lookup from a test device, returned all the proper information! Puzzling...

It is difficult to explain this issue to RIM support, and they also could not recreate the solution in their environment. On a whim, I decided to investigate the "Reset PIM Sync Global Field Mapping" command. After testing this in the test environment and determining that this command would not reset user's custom address book mappings, I ran it. Guess what? All lookup problems solved:

The Home Address is now properly labeled, and although blanked out above, the fields for street address, state, and zip code now appear along with city and country.

This solution points to the address book mappings being off kilter within the BES SQL database, but how did that happen? We don't touch them. And since both of our completely separate BES environments experienced the issue, I must believe that a particular upgrade path (we keep versions the same in US and EU) caused this mis-mapping.

Easy solution to a strange issue!

p.s. I discovered some other interesting lookup related information during this search that I will discuss in an upcoming post.