Question

Using the built-in Address Book framework for iPhone, how can I save a specific list of contacts to an array in NSUserDefaults? I need to save a list of recipients for later.

I want to make sure I do not run into problems if the user edits the contacts after my application is closed. Is there some sort of unique ID that each contact has, that I can save and look-up later?

Answer 1

ABRecordID‘s most certainly do change (having learned this the hard way – as a result of multiple machine contact sync)

Matt Gemmell has a nice writeup at iphone-dev-tips-for-synced-contacts

I don’t store the composite name, but rather the ABRecordId, first name, last name, an email address and a phone number (the last two of which are used directly by my app).

If I don’t get a hit on

 ABRecordRef aRef = ABAddressBookGetPersonWithRecordID(addressBook, aRecordId);

I use a bunch of code to find potential matches on last name, first name and then refine it by phone numbers.

As a final aside, I am associating a generated UUID for the contact so that all of this (potentially) fuzzy resolution is abstracted out of the data I’m associating with a contact.