Comments on: Cocoa Touch Tutorial: Extract Address Book Address Values on iPhone OS

By: Jeff Kelley

Jeff Kelley — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 21:33:07 +0000

I have to suggest against doing anything to modify the picker. Introspection of its subviews will work, sure, but Apple is at their leisure to change how that works, reject your application(s) if you mess with it too much, or do something that causes your app to crash when you attempt this. I’m also not aware of any callbacks that you can use to discover when the picker has finished loading; if you absolutely need to do this, you’re going to have to do some introspection to determine this. Since ABPeoplePickerNavigationController is a subclass of UINavigationController, which is itself a subclass of UIViewController, you can probably use the -isViewLoaded method to determine if it’s loaded its view yet. Thanks for the question!

By: Vlad

Vlad — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 19:52:45 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for a great article and the blog!

I’m looking for a way to do couple of things with the picker, and hope you will be able to help:
1. When is the best time to call for picker when the view is loaded?
I guess that my options are: viewWillAppear, viewDidAppear and viewDidLoad.
Currently, only the viewDidAppear shows me the picker, but I don’t understand why the other options do not work.
2. How do I know that the picker has finished loading?
I’m looking for some “hack” where I’m going to get all the subviews of the control, and I need to make sure I do that when the view 100% loaded.

I know this is too much for a simple blog comment, but I’ve been reading all the relevant blogs, articles, documentation… and couldn’t find any answers.

Thanks again,

By: Jeff Kelley

Jeff Kelley — Sat, 28 May 2011 20:27:47 +0000

Ruben,

Are you trying to display a contact info sheet and hide everything but addresses? That’s definitely possible. Use an ABPersonViewController to display the information, and set its displayedProperties property to the desired fields.

By: Ruben

Ruben — Sat, 28 May 2011 15:24:24 +0000

Can anyone help me?

I just only need the addresses fields to be in the contact info, and hide the all other fields, is it possible?

Thanks in advance.

By: Manjit Bedi

Manjit Bedi — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:02:56 +0000

Your code example has been very helpful – saved me buckets of time trawling through the documentation.

By: Phoney

Phoney — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:35:41 +0000

Yeah, I thought as much. Ho-Hum…

By: Jeff Kelley

Jeff Kelley — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 01:44:14 +0000

Phoney,

I don’t think that the UI is designed to be subclassed; you’d have to create something from scratch.

By: Phoney

Phoney — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:54:53 +0000

Hey Jeff,

Is it possible to change anything in the AddressBookUI?
I am looking to capture elements from the standard UI along with some custom fields and I want to extend the UI to achieve this.
Do you know if this is possible or will I need to create my own from scratch?

/Phoney

By: Jeff Kelley

Jeff Kelley — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:18:42 +0000

You’re welcome!

By: MadProfit

MadProfit — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 16:23:25 +0000

I want to really thank you for this blog. I have spent 3 days researching as a newbie how to do something like this without writing a lot of code like some of the books suggest (view controllers, arrays, etc) I adopted your code to essentially pull the email address and in the same method get the phone if it isn’t null.

Thanks a lot from the real newbie.