Matt Legend Gemmell Modesty is Lying

It’s funny, I was thinking about the ID problem a couple of weeks ago, even though I’m not working on anything relevant. It didn’t take me long to conclude that the DB should be tracking sets of IDs rather than a single value. Pity I didn’t work for Apple back when they made the address book, eh? :-)

Thanks for sharing! It’s comforting to know that other people are banging their heads against the same walls that you are :-)

In addition to the composite name, I also store the first and last names separately. The problem being that the RecordID’s are by default a simple 32 bit int sequence starting at 1. I haven’t been able to test this yet, but the ID’s are documented as only being unique -per device-. I expect that moving or syncing contacts from one device to another will result in overlapping ID ranges. In this case, getting a record by RecordID could well succeed but give you the wrong person. oops :-)

Also, if ABAddressBookCopyPeopleWithName fails when using the composite name (for example, because a person changed their jobs – new company name, new composite name *sigh*) you can fall back further to using just their actual name. (don’t ask me what do to when someone marries between syncs)

Quite a lot of work to enhance contact data with application data and keep them synchronized. (I’m really glad we can at least use background threads for this ;-)

Incrementing numbers suck. UUIDs for the reasonably high degree of win.

I have not had an opportunity to investigate this, but is the uniqueId (integer) different from the ABRecord: kABUIDProperty? Could you set the kABUIDProperty? Would it persist through a sync?

What about adding a hidden custom property? I know this is a little counter intuitive but this is almost storing most of your favorites information in the address book rather than your own database.

Oh you could also add a custom URL scheme and store everything in the person url property….

This is further complicated because you can create multiple address book entries with the same name. There is nothing stopping a person from having 2 identically named records that hold different information. i.e. you can have 2 contacts named Kate Bell with different Mobile numbers.

This is a bit of a disaster really. Nothing is 100%. Even presenting a user with a pick list if there are 2 results after doing a name search would leave them guessing which one they really meant.

Also, for those considering ‘background updates’ keep in mind that there are more users than you would anticipate that have many thousands of contacts. This is both memory intensive and time consuming to sync.

Matt – not sure how much you played around with this, but getting a person by Composite Name with the function ABAddressBookCopyPeopleWithName() doesn’t actually work in all cases. It only works for the simplest form of a name, but will not work if they use other fields such as suffix or middle name. In the default addressbook in xcode simulator, you can get Anna Haro, but you can’t get Daniel Higgins Jr. or Hank M. Zakroff. The Jr. and M. throw it off.

I’m quite amazed at the size of this hole. Its pretty much a killer for my app.

Unfortunately, Apple’s MobileMe sync doesn’t even work properly for Apple. Can we band together and ask Apple to fix this? I’ve used MobileMe and .Mac since they were first available, and constantly have to back up and refresh my contacts as they get mangled through syncing. It’s frustrating. I have thousands of contacts as I run my own Mac/iPhone software development firm…

To Apple’s credit, it is a difficult problem, complicated by the need to support third party sources like Exchange/Outlook. Every device has its own method of uniquely identifying records, which become meaningless when comparing/syncing with other sources. Non-Apple devices discard, ignore, or corrupt this metadata.

I personally think Apple with its deep pockets should fund an open standard for storing contacts that everyone can adopt. Even Microsoft. There’s no excuse for not solving this problem. If computers can sequence the human genome, model global weather patterns, and calculate PI to tons of decimal places… they ought to be able to handle my contacts better than an old-fashioned Rolodex. :-)

Matt, thanks for mentioning that Exchange-synced NULL label issue. That one bit me and finding your post helped pin down the problem.

Once the contact in iphone is synced with Microsoft Exchange, programming on contact may fail with no error notification. It means when I try to set an email to an existing contact with custom label. The code execute corrrectly(&errror parameter will be null after operation) but the email is not added to that contact actually.
Any idea about it?

Has there been any improvement on the unique ID issue? Browsing the files in the iPhone backup, the file (from the iPhone):

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mobilephone.speeddial.plist

lists the favorites from the phone app. This file contains an array of dicts that include the simple ABIdentifier as well as additional keys for ABDatabaseUUID (a true UUID), Label, Name, Property, Value, and also a key-value pair named ABUid which appears to also be a simple integer (instead of a UUID). Any ideas where this ABUid value comes from or where it is stored for use as a key to find a unique contact?

This is further complicated because you can create multiple address book entries with the same name. There is nothing stopping a person from having 2 identically named records that hold different information. i.e. you can have 2 contacts named Kate Bell with different Mobile numbers

Hello All,

I am developing an iPhone application, which requires to know the running device name and phone number. Is there a way to achieve this through address book. I am successfully able to read the device address book.

Does the address book has an device owners phone entry n it, and if it does then how can we differ it from other contacts?

Looking forward for the reply.

Thanks,
Pankaj