Insert Contact instead of NewRawContact

[slowcar]

Hi,
i would like to use your library to backup and restore contacts.
Looking at the Insert API it seems that i have to use NewRawContact objects to insert.
Would it be possible to insert Contact objects (deserialized from json, from example), or is there any way to convert a Contact to a NewRawContact without copying each field manually?
Cheers,
Simon

[slowcar]

I copied RawContactToNewRawContact.kt and made newCopy public with a companion object, which does most of the heavy lifting except for group memberships, which have to be added manually.
Using rawContactsQuery instead of query to read them in

[vestrel00]

That works!

I'm guessing you serialize actual RawContact instances into JSON (for example) in order to save them into a file and back them up. Then, you deserialize back into RawContact instances. So, you find the need to be able to convert RawContact to NewRawContact in order to insert them.

I was thinking that a safer approach would be to manually read values from RawContacts (for example name, email, phone, etc) into a JSON file. This would ensure compatibility with future versions of the library but it does require a lot more code and effort.

The best way to implement backup/restore IMO is by using vCARD (.VCF files). However, that is not yet implemented; #26 The library does support basic vCard sharing but thats probably not enough for your use case.

[vestrel00]

Hey @slowcar, thanks for considering this library 😀

Looking at the Insert API it seems that i have to use NewRawContact objects to insert.

Yes. The only way to insert new Contacts is by inserting new RawContacts. This is the case even if you do not use this API and instead use ContactsContract directly. I mentioned in the the Insert docs but it's easy to miss. From the official Android docs; https://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/ContactsContract.Contacts#operations

Attempting to create a Contact row directly will not work and will result in error.

Other libraries that attempt to abstract away the "RawContacts" construct and only expose "Contacts" constructs are inherently incorrect. I know this from experience because before I made this library public, thats how I initially designed the public facing API. I thought that it would make the library a lot easier for users to use if they did not have to deal with "RawContacts". You can see this if you go far back enough in the commit history. I encountered so many issues that I almost abandoned the project before making it public! I pretty much had to rewrite the entire library.

[vestrel00]

i would like to use your library to backup and restore contacts.

IMO, it would be better to backup RawContacts directly instead of dealing with Contacts.

For backup, you can use the RawContactsQuery API to get all the RawContacts. Then convert them to JSON (or whatever serialization you want to use) and save them to a local or remote file.

For restore, you can then use the Insert API to insert the RawContacts.

Would it be possible to insert Contact objects (deserialized from json, from example), or is there any way to convert a Contact to a NewRawContact without copying each field manually?

A "Contact" is a different construct from a "RawContact". All "Data" belong to "RawContact". Each Contact can be made up of one or more RawContacts. I wrote about this in the Contacts Provider / ContactsContract Basic Concept.

The data a Contact has is simply a reference to data from one of its RawContacts. For example, the Contact display name is automatically set by the Contacts Provider based on one of its RawContact's data (name, email, etc...).

If you use RawContacts directly in your backup/restore algorithm, you should not need to "convert a Contact to a NewRawContact".

[slowcar]

Thank you for your reply. I have written extensive code to export contacts, i mainly did not want to deal with the contentprovider api to read them as well (for a small new project) and looked around for a library. Thank you for providing it!

I have understood the difference between contact and rawContact, what i don't understand is the need for distinction between rawContact and newRawContact, it would have made my use case - which is probably not common - a bit easier .

For restore, you can then use the Insert API to insert the RawContacts.

That was my idea as well, i had to convert the rawContact objects to newRawContact objects though, and the code for that is not exposed in the library.

[vestrel00]

i don't understand is the need for distinction between rawContact and newRawContact,

It is important for immutability. RawContact is immutable whereas MutableRawContact are partially mutable and NewRawContact are fully mutable. There's a lot of reasons why I chose to design the API this way. You can read some of those reasons in this section of my dev-notes if you are interested.

i had to convert the rawContact objects to newRawContact objects though, and the code for that is not exposed in the library.

Yes. I'm sure you've seen it because you "copied RawContactToNewRawContact.kt and made newCopy public". I actually have a TODO there for this exact reason.

I was thinking some users would find it useful at some point. Perhaps that point is now 😁

[vestrel00]

@slowcar, do you mind creating a PR? All I would like you to do is remove the private and internal keywords from all of the newCopy() functions in RawContactToNewRawContact.kt 😄

I just thought would be cool if you became a contributor to this library. Feel free to say no. No pressure.