Generate vCard from AddressBook.framework

Question

I'm utilising the AddressBook.framework in my iPhone app, and I'd like to replicate something along the lines of the share feature in Contacts.app. This basically attach's a specific contacts vCard to an email. As far as I know, there is nothing in the documentation that mentions generating a vCard.

Is this a case of generating one myself? Or is there something available that can help me?

Answer 1

Totally agree with Dave DeLong's answer. Just want to add that since I simply wanted to create a vCard file (.vcf) and attach it to an in-app email action what I did was create a string, then a temporary file, with all the vCard fields I had data for.

In my case I made a method in my NSManagedObject subclass to return a -vCardRepresentation string.

An Objective-c category or simple framework would be a great help - I might do it when time.

The Wikipedia page and the formal spec for vCard (3.0) really help.

UPDATE 3: If you're using iOS 5 or later there's now a function in ABPerson that can return the vCard representation of the given person records:

CFDataRef ABPersonCreateVCardRepresentationWithPeople(CFArrayRef people);

UPDATE 2: I'm rushing to get an app complete, but because I did want to create vCard data and add it as attachments to in-app mail messages in several places I've now made a separate class controller that makes / hides the details of the vCard syntax. Then I just have a method that returns an NSData version of the vCard string to add directly to a mail message as an attachment. This is a much cleaner solution, you don't need to create any files, even if they were only temporary. Plus you don't really need an NSString representation of the data anyway, unless you did want to create a file and use it more than once to save re-making the data?

My controller class has a number of -setXXXX methods that add values to a dictionary where the keys are strings with the vCard field names, like FN, TEL and ADR. Then when I call its -vCardRepresentation, this now returns an NSData object (built by scanning the dictionary) that can be used directly in MFMailComposeViewController's -addAttachmentData:mimeType:fileName: method.

If I can tidy my code, so it's generic enough, I'll post it later.

UPDATE: Here's my code, it might help someone get started:

- (NSString *)vCardRepresentation
{
  NSMutableArray *mutableArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init];

  [mutableArray addObject:@"BEGIN:VCARD"];
  [mutableArray addObject:@"VERSION:3.0"];

  [mutableArray addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"FN:%@", self.name]];

  [mutableArray addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"ADR:;;%@",
                           [self addressWithSeparator:@";"]]];

  if (self.phone != nil)
    [mutableArray addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"TEL:%@", self.phone]];

  [mutableArray addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"GEO:%g;%g",
                           self.latitudeValue, self.longitudeValue]];

  [mutableArray addObject:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"URL:http://%@",
                           self.website]];

  [mutableArray addObject:@"END:VCARD"];

  NSString *string = [mutableArray componentsJoinedByString:@"\n"];

  [mutableArray release];

  return string;
}

Obviously I'm making reference to properties in my class, plus a method called -addressWithSeparator to build-up the data for the address, which has to include the ; separator even for optional address fields.

Answer 2

There does not appear to be any publicly posted code to do this. The Mac version of AddressBook.framework does have an ABPersonCopyVCardRepresentation(), but there is no equivalent on the iPhone.

Probably your best bet would be to take an existing parser/builder (such as the PEAR builder and parser) and translate them to Objective-C.

Another option might be to write your own builder. The grammar for vCards is not a difficult one.