CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneiosipadabaddressbook
rowwingman
rowwingman

Reputation: 5581

How to retrieve all contacts from ABAddressBook without duplicates

To get all contacts I'm using ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople method but, this method return all contacts with duplicates: in "Contacts" app I saw that almost every my contacts has linked card (it's show me that I have two same contacts one from iCloud and an other from my iPad). As I see in this reason ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople method return duplicate contacts.
How to get all contacts from ABAddressBook without duplicate?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3606

Answers (3)

Aardvark
Aardvark

Reputation: 598

From memory I think this returns only one record per user:

    ABRecordRef source = ABAddressBookCopyDefaultSource(addressBook);
    addressBookArray = (__bridge_transfer NSArray *)ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeopleInSourceWithSortOrdering(addressBook, source, kABPersonSortByLastName);

I've used it an it appears to work. Although you will have to jump through the linked contacts to get all the details about a user.

Remember to CFRelease source and addressBook when you are finished.

Upvotes: 1

CarlJ
CarlJ

Reputation: 9481

Maybe the ABContactHelper could help?!

Upvotes: 2

MrTJ
MrTJ

Reputation: 13202

I had the same problem and did not find another solution then the manual bidirectional-link-duplicate-removal process:

Two cascaded cycles (ordo n^2) that confronts the record ID of each contact-pair that was returned by ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople. Then I add to the final list only the contact with the smaller contact ID. It's not very beautiful solution but it works for me.

Upvotes: 0

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