Keep your organization's contacts up to date by importing contacts from vCard files located at remote servers.
You get new contacts and updates to existing contacts already on your phone. The app never overwrites or deletes existing contact data on your phone.
Save for granting the permission to access Contacts app (the address book), the app never asks anything from you. This is a tool for importing lots of contacts and you don't want to get bothered with questions about which new fields for which contacts you actually want to import.
The app downloads remote vCard files from http(s) URLs. Authentication happens either with HTTP basic authentication or posting username and password to a login URL. The app utilizes HTTP caching headers included in server responses, avoiding unnecessary downloads if the remote vCard file has not been changed since the last check.
There may be multiple sources for remote vCards. The app attempts to download vCard files from all of them. You can disable individual sources from importing, too.
NOTE: Use the app to import contacts only from sources you trust. The app is designed to import all contacts from the sources you specify. You should make a backup of your contacts before use.
After downloading a remote vCard file, the app builds changesets from the contact record data inside it.
An imported contact record is considered new if there's no other contact with the same name in the phone's address book (by comparing records' first and last names). Such a contact gets added to the address book as is.
A contact record with one matching name in the address book is considered a candidate for possible changes in record fields. The app marks a single-value-field (such as the job title) for addition if the record in the address book has no existing value for it. For multi-value-fields (such as phone numbers), any field with nonexisting values in the address book gets marked for addition. The labels of multi-value-fields are not compared.
If there are multiple name matches for an imported contact record, the app ignores the record.
After building the changesets, the app applies them to the address book.
The order of vCard sources matters: the app imports contact records by going through the sources from top to bottom. Contact records from the later sources might get ignored because a former source filled in the data already. For example, if the first source has a job title value for a person, then the app chooses that value and ignores the possible job title values for the same person from other sources.
- The app utilizes HEAD request to avoid unnecessary downloading of the remote file by checking if the Etag or Last-Modified response header has changed since the last import.
- The import job downloads and parses each vCard source asynchronously and in parallel (if the system lets it). The application of changesets to the address book happens serially. All this happens in the background.
- The name and URL fields in the vCard source detail view validate the input asynchronously, with throttling and switch-latest functionality (ensuring that only the response corresponding to the last URL validation request gets counted in, tackling the problem of interleaved responses).
- Uses Futures for handling complex asynchronous tasks and their dependencies to each other.
- Stores nonsensitive user data to
NSUserDefaults, JSON encoded. - Stores sensitive user data (usernames and passwords) to the phone's keychain, JSON encoded.
- The progress bar shown while importing has granularity up to the download progress of each individual vCard source. Record changeset application counts as well.
The app uses the following open source software, in modified or in original form:
- Alamofire by Alamofire Software Foundation
- KeychainItemWrapper by Apple Inc.
- Regular Expression for URL validation by Diego Perini
Thanks to Reaktor for sponsorship and the awesome people there for guidance! Tommi Asiala (@tommi) designed the app icon and got paid with a lunch coupon. 😊
Copyright © 2015-2016 Tuomas Kareinen.