Question

I have an app that displays ABAddressBook contacts in a UITableView. Currently I’m reading the contacts into an NSDictionary, however this appears to crash for some users, which I suspect is a memory issue.

Is there another approach to display ABAddressBook contacts in a UITableView without either first storing them in an NSDictionary or using ABPeoplePicker?

Answer 1

You can use following way,

ABAddressBookRef ab = ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions(NULL, NULL);
NSArray *arrTemp = (NSArray *)ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople(ab);

The above 2 lines will create an array for all your contacts on the iPhone.

Now whatever property of a contact you want to display you can display by using the below code. For example, I want to display the first name of all contacts and then create one Mutable array called it arrContact.

NSMutableArray *arrContact = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];
for (int i = 0; i < [arrTemp count]; i++) 
{
    NSMutableDictionary *dicContact = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];
    NSString *str = (NSString *) ABRecordCopyValue([arrTemp objectAtIndex:i], kABPersonFirstNameProperty);
    @try 
    {
        [dicContact setObject:str forKey:@"name"];
    }
    @catch (NSException * e) {
        [dicContact release];
        continue;
    }
    [arrContact addObject:dicContact];
    [dicContact release];
}

Now just display it using the arrContact array in a table view..