Contacts in PhoneGap

Sanjoli Gupta
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Basically, in every device that a person owns, it is bound to have contacts database built in to it. The contact database contains all the contacts that a person stores in mobile device but it does not give any guarantee that every phone manufacturer provides a standard when it comes to the contact field that it stores and retrieves.
Thus, PhoneGap contacts API does a good job of allowing users to create, update, and find contacts, all of which we will discuss here.The Contacts object in PhoneGap allow access to the device contacts database.

Learning about Creating Contact

The easiest way of how to use the Contacts API is to create contact. The contacts.create() is a method that allow you to create contact as

var myContact = navigator.contacts.create(properties);

When you use this method, it automatically creates a new contact object that we can then manipulate. This method does not persist the contact object to the device contacts database. To persist the contact object to the device, invoke the contact.save method.

Following is an Example.

function onDeviceReady() {
            var myContact = navigator.contacts.create();
          myContact.displayName = "Sanjoli Gupta";
            myContact.gender = "Female";
            console.log("The contact, " + myContact.displayName + ", is of the " + myContact.gender + " gender");
        }

Some of the Properties of contact are as follows:

id : It is a globally unique identifier(GUID).
displayName : It is the name of this contact that is suitable for display to end-users.
name : It contains all component of a person's name.
nickname : It is an informal name that we can address the contact.
phoneNumber : It contains an array of all the contact's phone number.
emails : It contains an array of all the contact's email addresses.
addresses : It contains an array of all the contact's addresses.
ims : This is an array of all the contact's instant messaging (IM) addresses
organizations : It contains an array of all the contact's organizations.
birthday : It contains the birthday of the contact.
note : This is a note about the contact.
photos : It contains an array of the contact's photos.
categories : It contains an array of all the contact's user-defined categories.
urls - It contains an array of web pages associated with the contact.

The best way to save lots of information is to use ContactField object especially in the case of phoneNumbers. For example if you want to store a number of e-mails for a contact, we use the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Contact Example</title>

    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="phonegap-1.3.0.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">

        // Wait for PhoneGap to load
        //
        document.addEventListener("deviceready", onDeviceReady, false);

        // PhoneGap is ready
        //
        function onDeviceReady() {
            var myContact = navigator.contacts.create();
       //store emails
            var emails = [2];
          emails[0] = new ContactField('work', '[email protected]', false);
          emails[1] = new ContactField('home', '[email protected]', false);
          myContact.emails = emails;
          myContact.save();
        }

    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Example_for_Contact</h1>
    <p>Contact</p>
</body>
</html>