OSTRealmContacts

Realm + AddressBook.framework

Wut?

This is an iOS Sample project that explores the importation of AddressBook contacts into a Realm database using Swift, bridged with an Objective-C based wrapper of ABAddressBook called RHAddressBook.

By default, the project uses an in-memory instance of Realm, but you can make a one-line change in OSTABManager to switch to a persisted, default Realm (so that you can, for example, check out the data in the Realm Browser.)

Features

Imports data from Contacts.app into a Realm database
Uses UISearchController and friends to display the results of predicate queries against the Realm instance
Responds to Address Book change notifications and inserts/updates records (but doesn't yet delete them)
This repo includes 1200 fake contacts to use in your dev environment. Just drag fake_contacts_1200.vcf onto your iOS Simulator.

Why?

I did something similar in Objective-C, CoreData and NSFetchedResultsController.

I wanted to learn more about Swift, gain a little bit of insight about bridging with ObjC, and play with Realm as a viable alternative to CoreData. I hope there's something others can learn here, and this provides a basis for me to learn back from all of you.

Please send questions, comments, hate, or preferably, love via @otanistudio.

Known Issues / TODOs

The predicates for searching through large datasets need more thought, but at 1200 records, perf is close to the Contacts app on a iPod Touch 5th Gen
If you've already run the app, and you want to switch from in-memory to default Realm (or vice-versa) then you'll need to delete the app, as the two engines will conflict with each other.
The app can crash when switching Contacts permissions while the app is running. This is related the way threads get stored inside an RHAddressBook singleton. I haven't verified whether this also happens in an Objective-C based app. We can either address this in a fork, or look into newer Swift-based libraries like https://github.com/a2/Gulliver.
Deleted records from the AddressBook don't sync across to the Realm database… yet.
Writes for each record happen in a batch within a GCD concurrent queue, but this might need to happen in a more efficient manner. We'll know for sure when this is tested by a very popular person with 25K+ records 😇.
While Swift makes prefix-style class namespacing "unnecessary," I still used the OST prefix as it still helped my brain think about the code.
I ran into problems with the Swift compiler when trying to include the RHAddressbook lib as part of the build target, so I had to build a separate static lib and include it that way for now. This won't work on 32-bit iOS Simulators (5, 4S) as there isn't a 32-bit slice for 386 in the prebuilt RHAddressBook "universal" static library, but it will run on actual 32-bit ARM devices (verified on an iPod Touch 5th Gen)

Thanks!

Realm. A sweet mobile database engine.

License & Copyright

OSTRealmContacts is Licensed under the MIT License.