Gettings Contacts with Xamarin Essentials

Sometimes we have to integrate some functionalities into our Apps that require obtaining information from contacts, previously, to achieve this we had to take more development time, but now we have very good news!!! Xamarin Essentials included it for us! We can implement this simply and easily! In this post, we will be learning how to do it!

First of all… What do I need?

Let’s add some platform settings. To implement it, follow the instructions added below:

We have more than one way to do it, let’s see:

Right click in your Android project Options Android Application Required permissions   ReadContacts

Or in your  AssemblyInfo.cs file under the Properties folder and add the following code:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_CONTACTS" /> />

view raw ContactInfo.xaml hosted with by GitHub

 For IOS and UWP you don’t need an additional configuration.

Let’s start!

What is Contacts.PickContactAsync()?

It’s the method that opens a user dialog and allow us to pick information of a specific user from a device.

	var contact = await Contacts.PickContactAsync();
	// Add here each one of the contact info that you need (Explained in the next step)

view raw ContactInfo.cs hosted with by GitHub

What  Contact information do we can obtain?

We have a lot of contact information to use! Let’s explore it!

To better understand, let’s see is a real contact where we will identify each of the information that we can obtain. Finally, we add a short code example of how we can obtain it to develop our applications.

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Code example:

	var givenName = contact.GivenName;
	var familyName = contact.FamilyName;
	var phones = contact.Phones;
	var emails = contact.Emails;

view raw ContactInfo.cs hosted with by GitHub

Important!

The iOS platform does not support the DisplayName property natively, that’s why this value is constructed as “GivenName + FamilyName”. In this case: Jessy Morris.

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Getting all contacts

If you want to get all the contact that you have on the device, you can do it! In this case, let’s use Contacts.GetAllAsync() instead of Contacts.PickContactAsync().  It receives a cancellation token as a parameter. (It’s optional)

The cancellationToken parameter in the GetAllAsync the method is only used on UWP.

	var cancellationToken = default(CancellationToken);
	var contacts = await Contacts.GetAllAsync(cancellationToken);

view raw ContactInfo.cs hosted with by GitHub

From here you can handle the data obtained as you like!

	foreach (var contact in contacts)
	contactsCollect.Add(contact);

view raw ContactInfo.cs hosted with by GitHub

Thanks for reading !!

Spanish post: https://es.askxammy.com/obteniendo-contactos-con-xamarin-essentials/

Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/essentials/contacts?tabs=android?WT.mc_id=DT-MVP-5003353