iOS 4 Programming Cookbook

Chapter 9. Address Book

9.0. Introduction

On an iOS device, the Contacts application allows users to add to, remove from, and manipulate their address book. The address book can be a collection of people and groups. Each person can have properties such as first name, last name, phone number, and email address assigned to her. Some properties can have a single value and some can have multiple values. For instance, the first name of a person is one value but the phone number can be multiple values (e.g., if the user has two home phone numbers).

The AddressBook.framework framework in the iOS SDK allows us to interact with the address book database on the device. We can get the array of all entities in the user’s address book, insert and change values, and much more.

To use the address-book-related functions in your application, follow these steps to first add AddressBook.framework to your application:

1. Find your current target in Xcode.

2. Right-click on your target and choose Add→Existing Frameworks.

3. From the list, choose AddressBook.framework, as shown in Figure 9-1.

4. Click Add.

Figure 9-1. Adding AddressBook.framework to our target application in Xcode

After you’ve added the framework to your application, whenever you want to use address-book-related functions you must include the main header file of the framework in your header (.h) or implementation (.m) file, like so:

#import <UIKit/UIKit.h> ...