I'm looking for a way to query contacts in my iPhone app based on a few things. First I only want contacts that have a phonenumber. Second, id like to sort the contacts in order of the number of times contacted.
Android provides attributes that makes this possible and easy to do.
I can't really say that I know the answer, but I believe I know where to find the answer:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/ContactData/Conceptual/AddressBookProgrammingGuideforiPhone/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007744-CH1-SW1
Here are some quotes from that document that seems relevant:
There are two ways to find a person record in the Address Book database: by name, using the function ABAddressBookCopyPeopleWithName, and by record identifier, using the function ABAddressBookGetPersonWithRecordID. To accomplish other kinds of searches, use the function ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople and then filter the results using the NSArray method filteredArrayUsingPredicate:.
To sort an array of people, use the function CFArraySortValues with the function ABPersonComparePeopleByName as the comparator and a context of the type ABPersonSortOrdering. The user’s desired sort order, as returned by ABPersonGetSortOrdering, is generally the preferred context.
Those quotes were both found on this page. I hope it helps.
Related
i have a kinda weird problem with haystack/elasticsearch trying to find tv episodes stored in my database based on a string like this: 's04e07' which means season 4 episode 7 and is a kind of standard format, but the search index has its problems with that.
Trying a few different things it looks like numbers are not indexed in EdgeNgramFields.
In a CharField i can only find exact word matches like '2013' if contained in the titel, but i have no luck finding 's04e07'.
How do i get my results out of the index?
How could i possibly change the hardcoded default mapping in haystack to index my stuff correctly?
I actually wrote about haystack a few days ago, I would suggest reading that one first:
Django Haystack Distinct Value for Field
It's not directly on point, but my advice here is the same. Stop using haystack.
Haystack comes with an outofthebox edgengram and ngram analyzers, which is cool, except these analyzers don't work in nearly all use cases.
They will especially not work in yours because you are mixing numbers and chars.
But my first question is, why can't you index the data like this:
"season":1
"episode":1
And then at search time break down the users search into the above format?
If that isn't possible, you can still PUT a mapping manually without letting haystack do it for you (which I recommend highly anyway because it's mappings are not correct). It's pretty easy to do with elasticutils.
Keep in mind, I don't think edgengram is exactly what you want here in any event. because it only grams from the edge and is most useful for autocompletes, for example if someone is typing s04e and you want to display a list of possible matches.
So, this depends on how users will query the data. Will it always be the above string whole, or parts of the string, or will they sometimes search for e07 and you want to show all seasons with episode 7's?
The last possibility here is to just index it as normal (haystack will choose snowball) and use prefix queries / regex queries to get what you want.
There have recently been several questions posted on Facebook.SO using CONTAINS() in the WHERE clause. It seems to work like the Graph API search function, AND functions as an indexed field. All great things for the FQL developer.
SELECT name,
username,
type
FROM profile
WHERE CONTAINS("Facebook")
However, the only official mention of the CONTAINS function appears in the unified_thread documentation. It is mentioned in passing, as a way to search for text contained in a message. It also appeared in this fbrell code sample.
But Contains doesn't seem to be a straightforward search. For example, this query:
SELECT name
FROM user
WHERE CONTAINS("Joe Biden")
returns "Joe Biden" and also "Joseph Biden" and "Biden Joe". But it also returns "Joe Scardino", "Lindsay Noyan" and "Mehmad Moha" among others. What relationship do these people have with the VP of the USA? They aren't my friends, so I'll never know.
There also appears to be the ability to pass CONTAINS a field to search on, however changing the end of my first query to `CONTAINS("Facebook", name) returns an OAuth error:
(#615) 'name' is not a valid search field for the profile table.
In my not-so rigorous testing, I have yet to find a field/table combination that does not return this error.
So what is this mystery function? How does it work? Can it allow us to do things to date impossible in FQL like traversing arrays and filtering data stored in strings?
An answer here would be great, but a description on an FQL functions & methods reference page on the official developer documentation site would be better still.
I don't think that a have any great answers here, but I can give a workaround for the issue of returning unrelated names- which I suspect is because people have made public posts about Joe Biden, liked him, or so on. If you do the following:
SELECT name
FROM user
WHERE CONTAINS("Joe Biden")
AND strpos(lower(name),lower("Joe Biden")) >=0
You will get a resultset that only contains the right names- though it removes the advantage of also returning Joseph Biden, etc. etc.
My personal point of pain is that CONTAINS() appears to work with partial strings (e.g. "Joe Bide") on the profile table, but not on the user table. Very frustrating.
I have a REST service that allows people to put in a course title as part of the query to get scores, but, sometimes they may want to get a group, such as Calculus% for Calc 1, 2 and 3.
But, what is the best way to give them an option that makes sense?
For example, I have http://localhost/myrest/any/any/Calculus III
where the first two parameters are student id and some grade category.
I don't think having http://localhost/myrest/any/any/contains/Calculus III is a good use as then I will need to force them to use equals if that is what they are looking for.
Another option is http://localhost/myrest/any/any/Calculus% or http://localhost/myrest/any/any/%Calc% is another option, but then you have removed the option to easily use % as an allowed character.
So, to give additional filtering options in a REST URL, what is the best (defined as simplest/most intuitive for the user) way to allow contains or starts with.
In your system, would the following query list all subjects in the grade category?
http://localhost/myrest/any/any/
If yes, then one option you can consider is extracting the non-exact subject name into a GET parameter. Thus without breaking the current logic where having a full name of the subject in the URL provides the score for that subject, you'd also have the ability to filter the list of subjects within the same grade category by means of the GET parameter.
For example:
http://localhost/myrest/any/any/?search=Calculus*
... could provide a result like this:
<subjects>
<subject uri="/myrest/any/any/Calculus%20I">A</subject>
<subject uri="/myrest/any/any/Calculus%20II">B</subject>
<subject uri="/myrest/any/any/Calculus%20III">C</subject>
</subjects>
This is a noob question. According to Facebook API documentation, the sex field in Users.getInfo() function returns values based on users' locale. Hence, determine the gender of user is difficult.
Any solution suggested?
1) This isn't an elegant solution, and perhaps there's a better way that uses the API, but what if you manually created a look-up table for different values of 'sex' in different locales? You could try checking out facebook profiles of people from different countries and get the string displayed for their sex. Then, put that into some kind of dictionary data structure that allows you to grab the M-F string pair based on the locale's code (also given by getInfo()). For example en-US => (male, female), ja-JP => (男性, 女性). Of course, you could try using google translate too. After you gathered this data for a handful of the main locales, you'd be more-or-less covered. Maybe someone on the internets already has done it.
Of course, you could try emailing someone who works on the API for these values. The list of locale codes is here http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Locales .
2) Here is probably a better solution than (1). If you directly query the FQL User table, the value returned in 'sex' will always be English, starting from February 7 2010. More information about that is here: http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/User_%28FQL%29 . So, perhaps in the future getInfo() will return only English too. Who knows.
3) The answer to your question is also given on this existing post: Facebook FQL user table `sex` field : how to return male/female even the user is using different locale?
With the AddressBook API, the only way to get a list of all of the people seems to be via 'ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople' if you're not using 'ABPeoplePickerNavigationController'.
ABPeoplePickerNavigationController's pick a person and dismiss the view behavior is not what I need. Instead, what I'd like to do is load the address book contents into my own table view and then do some custom selection behavior.
But is there any way to deal with partially loading the address book data instead of the entire list to supply the data as a the table's data source? If say the address book contained 3000 entries, then I'm copying all of that data into a local array -- is there a more optimal way around this to achieve better performance?
Not sure its optimal but if you seek to show all the content in your table, it must be "sorted" somehow,
suppose you simple sort it alphabetically, then you can instead of copy all the addressbook just ask for it to return a list of records starting with "a"
the method for this is I think:
CFArrayRef ABAddressBookCopyPeopleWithName (
ABAddressBookRef addressBook,
CFStringRef name
);
name can be a "a*" which would return all people starting with a.
multiple calls to this method from your table could be used to avoid copying all people I think.
hope this helps,
-t