Contact

Tizen enables you to manage the contacts and persons listed in your address books. A Contact object is always associated with a specific address book. A Person object is an aggregation of one or more contacts associated with the same person.

This feature is supported in mobile applications only.

The main features of the Contact API include:

• Address book management

  You can create a new address book using the addAddressBook() method of the ContactManager interface (you also need the Account API).

  To access an existing contact, you must first retrieve the Contact object from the applicable address book. To access the device address books, you can use the getDefaultAddressBook() method of the ContactManager interface to retrieve the default address book, or the getAddressBooks() method to retrieve all the available address books as an array. To get a specific address book, use the getAddressBook() method.

• Contact management

  You can add and manage a contact by using the applicable methods of the AddressBook interface. When managing a single contact at a time, the operations are handled in a synchronous mode.

  You can create and manage multiple contacts simultaneously by using the applicable batch methods: addBatch(), updateBatch(), and removeBatch(). The batch mode provides faster, optimized processing of multiple contacts.

  Note

  The batch mode does not provide progress information about operations. To ensure that you can view the progress, break the batch operation down into multiple smaller batch operations. For example, break down a batch of 100 update requests into 10 batch operations that update 10 records at a time. Additionally, breaking down a batch operation helps you avoid blocking other database operations, such as add or remove.

  When searching for contacts, you can create attribute filters, attribute range filters, and composite filters based on specific filter attributes. You can also sort the search results.

• Group management

  You can manage contact groups, including getting, updating, and deleting them, using the applicable methods of the AddressBook interface.

• Contact change notifications

  You can keep the address book in your application synchronized with external contact manager by receiving notifications in your application when contact information changes.

  The addChangeListener() method of the Addressbook interface registers an event listener, which starts asynchronously once the addChangeListener() method returns the subscription identifier for the listener. You can use the AddressBookChangeCallback interface to define listener event handlers for receiving the notifications.

  Note
  The listener object that is the first argument of the addChangeListener() method must have at least 1 event handler defined. If no handlers are defined, a TypeMismatchError error occurs.

  Every change made to the address book triggers an event for which you can define a notification. For batch mode operations, each requested batch operation generates only a single event.

• Person management

  You can manage persons, including searching, updating, and deleting, by using the applicable methods of the ContactManager interface. When managing a single person at a time, the operations are handled in a synchronous mode.

  You can handle multiple persons simultaneously using the applicable batch methods: updateBatch() and removeBatch().

  Persons are automatically added or modified when contacts are added to or unlinked from existing persons. You cannot add persons directly.

  When searching for persons, you can filter and sort the search results based on specific filter attributes.

• vCard format conversions

  You can convert the contacts to vCard format or back to import and export contacts.

  The vCard (RFC 2426) file format (.vcf or .vcard) is a standard for electronic business cards, which contain contact information, such as name, address, phone numbers, email addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and audio clips.

  The Contact API supports vCard version 3.0.