Accessing iOS Address Book with Swift: array count of zero

Question

I am trying to write a simple method to ask a user for access to their address book and then print out the name of each person in the address book. I\'ve seen a number of tu

Answer 1

There seems to be a bug either with the compiler or the framework where ABAddressBookRef is declared a typealias of AnyObject, but it needs to be NSObject in order to unwrap it from the Unmanaged! returned by ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions. A workaround is to convert it to and from an opaque C pointer. The following code works, but it should probably be doing a lot more error checking (and there is also probably a better way of working around this issue):

var addressBook: ABAddressBookRef?

func extractABAddressBookRef(abRef: Unmanaged!) -> ABAddressBookRef? {
    if let ab = abRef {
        return Unmanaged.fromOpaque(ab.toOpaque()).takeUnretainedValue()
    }
    return nil
}

func test() {
    if (ABAddressBookGetAuthorizationStatus() == ABAuthorizationStatus.NotDetermined) {
        println("requesting access...")
        var errorRef: Unmanaged? = nil
        addressBook = extractABAddressBookRef(ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions(nil, &errorRef))
        ABAddressBookRequestAccessWithCompletion(addressBook, { success, error in
            if success {
                self.getContactNames()
            }
            else {
                println("error")
            }
        })
    }
    else if (ABAddressBookGetAuthorizationStatus() == ABAuthorizationStatus.Denied || ABAddressBookGetAuthorizationStatus() == ABAuthorizationStatus.Restricted) {
        println("access denied")
    }
    else if (ABAddressBookGetAuthorizationStatus() == ABAuthorizationStatus.Authorized) {
        println("access granted")
        self.getContactNames()
    }
}

func getContactNames() {
    var errorRef: Unmanaged?
    addressBook = extractABAddressBookRef(ABAddressBookCreateWithOptions(nil, &errorRef))
    var contactList: NSArray = ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople(addressBook).takeRetainedValue()
    println("records in the array \(contactList.count)")

    for record:ABRecordRef in contactList {
        var contactPerson: ABRecordRef = record
        var contactName: String = ABRecordCopyCompositeName(contactPerson).takeRetainedValue() as NSString
        println ("contactName \(contactName)")
    }
}