Mark,
   Could you provide the following details, so that we can reproduce the issue:

1. Code snippet that led to this failure (since which "query" is called affects 
the
parse behavior).
2. full stack trace

Thanks.

As per the contact xml schema
(http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/docs/2.0/schema/contact_atom.rnc)  
"element
gd:orgTitle { xsd:string }", orgtitle cannot be empty.  it looks like there are
contacts that dont have the person's job role thats causing the problem.

I'm having the same problem when querying contacts:

Caused by: com.google.gdata.util.ParseException: [Line 421, Column 657, element
gd:orgTitle] Missing required text content
       at com.google.gdata.util.XmlParser.throwParseException(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.util.XmlParser.parse(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.util.XmlParser.parse(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.data.BaseFeed.parseAtom(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.data.BaseFeed.readFeed(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.client.Service.getFeed(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.client.Service.getFeed(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.client.GoogleService.getFeed(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.client.Service.query(Unknown Source)
       at com.google.gdata.client.Service.query(Unknown Source)

I'm also using 1.27.0

It looks like there are some contacts with stale orgTitle information.  I've 
opened
up an internal bug to investigate this on our servers (internal bug #1696355). 

In the meantime, you could try finding which contact is causing issues by 
examing the
xml response.  Once you do that, you can try updating that contact through the 
Gmail
contacts interface.

Here are instructions for getting a trace of the xml with the Java client.  With
console logging enabled, run your code with following jvm flags turned on:

com.google.gdata.util.LoggableInputStream.level = ALL
com.google.gdata.util.LoggableOutputStream.level = ALL

If you have not used java logging system before, here is one of the ways to do 
it:

1. Create a text file "logging.properties" with following lines:

handlers = java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler
.level = ALL
java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level = ALL
java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.formatter = java.util.logging.SimpleFormatter
com.google.gdata.util.XmlParser.level=INFO

2. pass this file as jvm_flag to your binary
"-Djava.util.logging.config.file=logging.properties".

3. Alternatively you can try this one of the contacts examples shipped with the
client library, by updating build-smaples/contacts.xml, by adding the following 
line
to "sample.contacts.run" rule
<jvmarg 
value="-Djava.util.logging.config.file=/home/vbarathan/logging.properties"/>

Any update on this issue ? It's been driving us CRAZY for weeks. Other apps 
(gsyncit
seems to show up often, but there are others) write contacts with the empty 
orgTitle,
which then blows up the client library when we read the data. Should I be 
looking at
hacking the client library to remove the check, or is there a plan afoot to 
clean up
the data in the service ?
Thanks.

David,
  Looks like its a combination of issues between server-side code and the
client-library.  Could send the problematic xml blob (I dont have the right set 
of
data to prove my theory).  You can use the
http://googlecodesamples.com/oauth_playground/ to retrieve the xml.

  Yes we can relax the rules in the client-library, but i would like to make sure
that im solving the right problem.  Sorry about the delay in tackling this 
issue.

Cheers.

Hi, sorry for the delay. Been in airplanes for a couple of days.
So, I can not reproduce the problem with a test account (I don't know what it 
takes
to get the bad orgTitle content in there). I do have the syndrome happening on 
300+
live user accounts though, and have been able to single-step through the client 
code
using one of those accounts (and also get packet traces of the wire data). I 
can't
just post that data here since it's real user data and hence sensitive. 
I can report that it always contains <gd:orgTitle></gd:orgTitle> (empty).
If there's a way to securely send you the data or a few affected usernames so 
you can
investigate, please let me know. You can get me at : david@nuevasync.com

David,
    We have a fix in client library that will be available in upcoming release
(within next 2 weeks).  Also we are fixing this in server-side to handle this 
field
consistently.

Cheers.

For those (like me) who are too impatient to wait for an official fix, attached 
is a 
patch.

Enjoy!

[deleted comment]

You may find that the same patch has to be done for orgName as well.

This should be fixed now.  Let use know if you have any issues.

David/Baolngnt,
    Just to be clear, the Contacts API server has a fix.  so you wont see empty
orgName and orgTitle anymore.  We realized that even with the client-side fix, 
there
were still some outstanding issues.  So we have decided to keep the restriction 
in
the client code (i.e non-empty orgName and orgTitle) and ensure that the server
either yanks out the element or has a non-empty element.  Please let us know if 
you
see any issues.