AddressBook

The ABAddressBook class provides a programming interface to the Address Book—a centralized database used by multiple applications to store contact and other personal information about people. The Address Book database also supports the notion of a “group” containing one or more persons. People may belong to multiple groups, and groups may also belong to other groups with some restrictions (for example, no circular references are allowed).

The ABGroup class supports the concept of a “group” containing one or more persons. People may belong to multiple groups, and groups may also belong to other groups unless the relationship causes a circular reference. The only predefined property of a group is its name. However, similar to person records, you can add your own properties to group records. Groups not only help to organize person records, but also allow you to create email distribution lists.

A reference to an ABGroup object.

The ABMultiValue and ABMutableMultiValue classes are used to represent properties that might have multiple values. Each value in a multivalue list must be of the same type, and must have an associated predefined or user-defined label, and unique identifier. The labels, however, need not be unique. For example, you can have multiple Home phone numbers. Each multivalue object may have a primary identifier—used as a default value when a label is not provided. For example, a person record may have multiple addresses with the labels Home and Work, where Work is designated as the primary value. Instances of this class are immutable, see ABMutableMultiValue for methods that manipulate the content of a multivalue list.

The ABMultiValue and ABMutableMultiValue classes are used to represent properties that might have multiple values. Each value in a multivalue list must be of the same type, and must have an associated predefined or user-defined label, and unique identifier. The labels, however, need not be unique. For example, you can have multiple Home phone numbers. Each multivalue object may have a primary identifier—used as a default value when a label is not provided. For example, a person record may have multiple addresses with the labels Home and Work, where Work is designated as the primary value. Instances of ABMutableMultiValue are mutable, see ABMultiValue for additional methods that access the content of a multivalue list.

The ABPeoplePickerView class allows you to customize the behavior of people-picker views in an application’s user interface.

The ABPerson class encapsulates all information about a person in the Address Book database—an instance of ABPerson corresponds to a single person record in the database. The ABPerson class defines properties such as the person’s name, company, address, email addresses, and phone numbers.

A reference to an ABPerson object.

The ABPersonView class provides a view for displaying and editing contacts.

ABRecord is an abstract superclass providing a common interface to, and defining common properties for, all Address Book records. A property is a field in the database record, such as the first or last name of a person record. ABRecord defines the types of properties supported, and basic methods for getting, setting, and removing property values.

The ABSearchElement class is used to specify a search query for records in the Address Book database.

A reference to an ABSearchElement object.

NSObject is the root class of most Objective-C class hierarchies. Through NSObject, objects inherit a basic interface to the runtime system and the ability to behave as Objective-C objects.