Match AddressBook Records from IOS & OS X?

Question

Is there a way to match a unique identifier from a ABPerson record on OS X to one on IOS ? At first glance I cannot get the same id from the same person on my address book. For starters, on the mac the property kABUIDProperty is of type string, and on iOS there is the ABRecordID which is an integer type.

So my question is, how can I retrieve the same ABPerson record on IOS & OS X, considering that both devices are synced vía iCloud.

Answer 1

Had the same problem, so I've decided to gather all the information on topic.

From the Address Book Programming Guide (iOS)

Every record in the Address Book database has a unique record identifier. This identifier always refers to the same record, unless that record is deleted or the data is reset. Record identifiers can be safely passed between threads. They are not guaranteed to remain the same across devices

From the Address Book Programming Guide (OSX)

Each group and person has a unique identifier. It’s set when the record is created, and guaranteed never to change even if a user changes the group’s or person’s name or other information. Use this identifier if your application needs to store a reference to a group or person. For more information, see the ABRecord method uniqueId.

But appears that in reality it does change for example when user turns off/on iCloud :

http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/11/07/kabuidproperty/

So the best way to do this is :

The recommended way to keep a long-term reference to a particular record is to store the first and last name, or a hash of the first and last name, in addition to the identifier. When you look up a record by ID, compare the record’s name to your stored name. If they don’t match, use the stored name to find the record, and store the new ID for the record.

also worth reading: Keeping a long-term reference to an IOS AddressBook entry

Regarding the new Contacts Framework :

CNContact.identifier

It is recommended that you use the identifier when re-fetching the contact. An identifier can be persisted between the app launches. Note that this identifier only uniquely identifies the contact on the current device.