GroupMe Contact | The address book

Question

I want to build ContactsTableViewController as GroupMe . It shows all the contacts in my address book and even those who are users of GroupMe.

It seems that ABPeoplePickerNavigationController cannot be configured .

• So, if I access address book contacts using ABAddressBook and ABPerson , what is the best way to display them using a custom UITableViewController ?

  I don’t want to just load all the Address Book contacts into NSArray , because it can kill the memory (I know people who have thousands of address book contacts on their phones). I use Core Data and NSFetchedResultsController for large result sets like this. But for this I would have to create an ABPerson model in Core Data, which would be easy, but synchronization with the address book seems complicated and ridiculous.

• What is the best way to link / associate GroupMe contacts with address book contacts?

• Is there anything else I should know / consider when trying to recreate this interface in the style of GroupMe?

Answer 1

I am one of the developers of iOS GroupMe, and this is what we do.

• We scan the users address book and store it in Core Data. We have a Contact object that has 1-to-many by phone numbers and 1-to-many by email addresses. The first scan may take a little time if there are many contacts, but in each subsequent scan, we ignore any ABRecordRef that kABPersonModificationDateProperty has before our last scan. This makes updates much faster.

• Then, assuming that the user has selected contact synchronization, we send to our server phone numbers and email addresses that will correspond to existing GroupMe users.

• Finally, we pull out GroupMe relationships based on matches (from phone, email, facebook, twitter) and store them in Core Data. If the connection was made because of the phone / email that already exists in the user's address book, we transfer these values ​​back to the relationship so that we can create a 1 to 1 relationship between the GroupMe relationship and the contact that we saved in Core Data in step 1 Thus, we can easily create an NSFetchRequest for local contacts or GroupMe relationships and get relationship data at any point (so that we can show that the local contact is a GroupMe user, etc. - like Aaron G. in your screenshot)

We also use NSFetchedResultsController , so we can receive updates reflected in the user interface if our background operations find new contacts / relationships.

The only other tips are to make sure that you have a fetch request to pre-fetch all relationships, so the reasons for loading do not affect the basic data when scrolling to fill in the errors.

And yes, keeping your n'sync master data with a user address book more tedious than stupid is worth having easy access to it for queries that all this jazz needs to know.