10.2. Retrieving All the People in the Address Book
Problem
You want to retrieve all the contacts in the user’s address book.
Solution
Use the ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople
function
to retrieve an array of all contacts:
- (BOOL) application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions{ ABAddressBookRef addressBook = ABAddressBookCreate(); if (addressBook != nil){ NSLog(@"Successfully accessed the address book."); NSArray *arrayOfAllPeople = (__bridge_transfer NSArray *) ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople(addressBook); NSUInteger peopleCounter = 0; for (peopleCounter = 0; peopleCounter < [arrayOfAllPeople count]; peopleCounter++){ ABRecordRef thisPerson = (__bridge ABRecordRef)[arrayOfAllPeople objectAtIndex:peopleCounter]; NSLog(@"%@", thisPerson); /* Use the [thisPerson] address book record */ } CFRelease(addressBook); } self.window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame: [[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]]; self.window.backgroundColor = [UIColor whiteColor]; [self.window makeKeyAndVisible]; return YES; }
Discussion
After accessing the user’s address
book database, we can call the ABAddressBookCopy
ArrayOfAllPeople
function to retrieve an array of all the contacts in that address
book. The return value of this function is an immutable array of type
CFArrayRef
. You can’t work with
this type of array as you would work with instances of NSArray
, but you have two ways to traverse a
CFArrayRef
array. First, it
natively supports two functions:
CFArrayGetCount ...
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